Muhammad Asad

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This page is about the 20th century writer and diplomat born Leopold Weiss. For the 17th century German lutenist and composer, see Sylvius Leopold Weiss.
Muhammad Asad
Born Leopold Weiss
July 2, 1900
Lviv, Ukraine (previously Lemberg, Austro-Hungarian Empire)
Died February 20, 1992
Spain
Residence Spain
Occupation Writer
Religion Islam (previously Judaism)
Spouse(s) Elsa Schiemann, Munira Asad, Paola Hameeda Asad

Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss in July 1900 in what was then Austro-Hungarian Lwów in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Lviv in Ukraine; died 1992) was a Jew who converted to Islam and later served as one of the first Pakistani ambassadors to the United Nations.[1]

Contents

[edit] Biography

Asad was a descendant of a long line of rabbis. However, his father was a barrister. He received a thorough religious education. He was proficient in Hebrew from an early age and was also familiar with Aramaic. He studied the Old Testament, as well as the text and commentaries of the Talmud, the Mishna and Gemara. Furthermore, he delved into the intricacies of Biblical exegesis and the Targum.

After abandoning university in Vienna, Asad (or Weiss, as he was then called) drifted aimlessly around 1920s Germany, even working briefly for the expressionist film director Fritz Lang (actually F.W.Murnau, according to The Road to Mecca). By his own account after selling a jointly written film script, he blew the windfall on a wild party at an expensive Berlin restaurant, in the spirit of the times. He got his first journalism published through sheer chutzpah while working as a telephone operator for an American news agency in Berlin. Using the simple expedient of ringing up her Berlin hotel room, he obtained an exclusive interview with the visiting wife of the Russian author Maxim Gorky, and the story was taken up by his employers.

Weiss later moved to the British Mandate of Palestine, staying in Jerusalem at the house of an uncle, the psychoanalyst Dorian Weiss. He picked up work as a stringer for the Frankfurter Zeitung, selling articles on a freelance basis. His pieces were noteworthy for their understanding of Arab fears and grievances against the Zionist project. Eventually contracted as a full-time foreign correspondent for the paper, his assignments led him to an ever-deepening engagement with Islam, which after much thought led to his religious conversion in 1926. He spoke of Islam thus:

"Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other; nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking; and the result is a structure of absolute balance and solid composure."

His travels and sojourns through Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran (he wrote many insightful articles on Shiism), and also Afghanistan and the southern Soviet Republics, were viewed with great suspicion by the Colonial Powers. One English diplomat in Saudi Arabia described him in a report as a "Bolshevik", and it is true that he took a close interest in the many liberation movements that were active at this time with the aim of freeing Muslim lands from colonial rule. He ended up in India where he met and worked alongside Muhammad Iqbal, the poet-philosopher, who had proposed the idea of an independent Muslim state in India, which later became Pakistan.

During WWII he was interned there by the British as an enemy alien. His parents meanwhile, were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. Because of his out-spoken support for the Pakistan Movement, after Independence and the Partition of 1947, Asad was appointed Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations[dubious – discuss], as well as working with the Pakistani Foreign Ministry from 1949 till the early 1950s.[dubious – discuss] He is credited with drafting the Objectives Resolution, which became the Preamble to the Constitution of Pakistan.[dubious – discuss] Towards the end of his life, disturbed by a emerging fanaticism of some of his fellow Muslims.[dubious – discuss], he moved to Spain and lived there with his second wife, the Muslim convert Paola Hameeda Asad, until his death in 1992. He was buried in the Muslim cemetery of Granada.

Asad wrote several books, and a biography of his early life has been published in German, Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad. Von Galizien nach Arabien 1900-1927 by Gunther Windhager (Bohlau Verlag 2002). Weiss's own version of this period is Road to Mecca, an account of his Middle Eastern travels and his conversion, as well as his thoughts on the growing Zionist movement. He also wrote The Message of The Qur'an, a translation and brief commentary on the Muslim holy book based on his own knowledge of classical Arabic and on the authoritative classical commentaries. It has been acclaimed as one of the best, if not the best, translations of the Quran into English, although it has been criticised by some traditionalists for its Mutazilite leanings. He also wrote a translation and commentary on the Sahih Bukhari, the most authoritative collection of Hadith. In addition, he wrote This Law of Ours where he sums up his views on Islamic law and rejects decisively the notion of taqlid, or strict judicial precedent which has been accepted as doctrine by many Muslim sects, while being rejected by others such as the Salafis. He also makes a plea for rationalism and plurality in Islamic law, which he sees as the true legacy of the salaf or earliest generations of Muslims. In his book Islam at the Crossroads, he outlines his view that the Muslim world must make a choice between living by its own values and morality or accepting those of the West, in which case, they would always lag behind the West, which had had more time to adjust to those values and mores, and would end up compromising their own religion and culture. There are some playfully cryptic references to him in the recent bestseller The Orientalist by Tom Reiss (Random House 2005), and some slightly more sinister ones in the English translations of W.G. Sebald.

He is father of Talal Asad, an eminent anthropologist specialized in religious studies and postcolonialism.

[edit] Works

[edit] Documentary

A documentary titled " A road to Mecca" on Muhammad Asad has been released in 2009 which is directed by Georg Misch and filmed in Austria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, USA, Morocco and Spain. A well made documentary has won the following awards:

2009 Jerusalem Film Festival 2009 Dubai Film Festival Jury Award, 2008 FIDADOC Film Festival (Morocco) Best Cinematography Award, 2008 Diagonale Festival of Austrian Films 2008 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival 2008 Vancouver International Film Festival

For more information go to : http://www.icarusfilms.com/new2009/mecc.html

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Muhammad Asad's Journey into Islam

[edit] External links

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