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"Simple" is the last adjective that should be applied to the story of Muhammad Asad. It began in 1900 with the birth of Leopold Weiss in Lvov (then part of the Habsburg empire, now Ukraine). He had a very religious upbringing, the family moved to Vienna in 1914 and aged 20, he went on to Berlin to pursue his dream of becoming a journalist. In 1922, he travelled to Palestine and was repelled by the Zionists actions there. He got into a heated argument with Chaim Weizman, the leader of the Zionist movement but was fascinated by his first contacts with Arabs and Muslims. What started out as a naïve orientalist fascination went much further: For him, the complexity and spirituality of Islam was a counterbalance to the Western materialism of the 1920's that he despised so much. He travelled extensively in the Middle East and the contact with Bedouins was especially influential on him. In 1926 he converted to Islam and took the name Muhammad Asad. He did the pilgrimage to Mecca and immersed himself in the study of the Koran. Muslim renaissance became Asad's goal, he travelled far and wide, conferred with kings, leaders as well as common people and became a close friend of King Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia.
In 1932, on a journey through BritishIndia, Asad became a close friend of philospher and poet Muhammed Iqbal, who asked him to join his efforts to create the first Muslim state in 1947 Pakistan. They collaborated on Asad´s book “Islam at the crossroads” which was published in 1934. For the duration of the second world war, he was interned in a camp for enemy aliens while his parents perished in the concentration camps back in Europe.
Throughout his life, Asad campaigned for a better understanding between the Muslim world and the West and published a multitude of highly significant books, hundreds of articles and essays. His magnus opus, however was his commentated translation of the Koran into English, published after 17 years of work in 1980 and dedicated to "people who think." He died in 1992 in Andalusia, Spain. 10 years after his death, he remains a virtually unknown person for the general public. |
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