From: waseems@sco.COM (Waseem Siddiqi)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.pakistan
Subject: Mohammad Asad
Date: 16 Aug 92 00:49:20 GMT
Organization: SCO Canada, Inc.

Someone requested the article on Mohd Asad.
Here it is

waseem
---------------------------------------------------------------

                            MUHAMMAD ASAD

Buried in the small Muslim cemetery in Granada in Spain is one Muhammad Asad,
one of the most prominent Muslim thinkers of the twentieth century. His life was
one of great adventure, whether as a teenage soldier in the Austrian army in
1918 or as a young journalist in the Berlin of the Twenties. His travels in the
Middle East far surpassed the ventures of Burton and Doughty in their range and
in their close involvement with the peoples and cultures of the region. 

  Asad was Pakistan's ambassador at the United Nations in the early Fifties,
and the confidant of many major Muslim figures including King Abdul Aziz Ibn
Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, and his son King Faisal; Omar Mukhtar, the
Libyan mujahid who rebelled against the Italian occupation; and Mohammad
Iqbal, the great Pakistani poet and philosopher. Yet Asad died in near ob-
scurity in Mijas on the Costa del Sol last month. News of his death filtered out
only weeks later, but it has left a profound sense of loss among his many
admirers. 

  He was born Leopold Weiss in Lwow, Galicia - now in Poland but then part of
the Austrian Empire - in 1900, the son of a Jewish barrister and grandson of
an Orthodox rabbi. His almost insatiable "urge to wander" and "inner
restlessness" were evident from his teens. At 14 he joined the Austrian army,
by Lying about his age and name, only to be traced by his father. Four years
Later he was drafted but within a few weeks revolution broke out, the Austrian
Empire collapsed, and the war was over. 

  He studied history of art and philosophy at Vienna University then went to
Prague and later Berlin, where he was involved with the intellectual circle
centred on the old Cafe des Westens. His break in journalism came in 1921 when
he charmed Madame Gorky (then on a secret visit to Berlin) into giving him a
scoop about the Russian famine for which he won promotion at the United
Telegraph news agency. 

  Invited to Jerusalem by his uncle, Dorian Weiss, a prominent psychiatrist
and early pupil of Freud, he left the news agency that year for a journey to the
Middle East which was to change his life. In Jerusalem he encountered the
Zionist Committee of Action but from the outset conceived a strong objection to
Zionism - an objection which he personally conveyed to Dr Chaim Weizmann, the
leader of the Zionist movement. At the same time he became a special
correspondent for Frankfurter Zeitung, making a name for himself with his dis-
patches; from Palestine which were later published in a book entitled
Unromantisches Morgenland (1924). 

  He travelled extensively in the Mashreq and Maghreb, and Transjordan, where 
he befriended the Emir. He briefly returned to Europe where he worked under
Heinrich Simon, editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, who sent him on his second
journey to the Middle East, in 1924, after he had seen his parents, in Vienna,
for the last time. In Cairo he met a prominent Islamist thinker, Mustafa Al-
Maraghi, a pupil of the great Egyptian reformer Mohammed Abduh, and attended
Arabic classes at Al Azhar University. The turning point came in 1926 when he
converted to Islam, together with his first wife, Elsa, a friend from Berlin
days. He lived in Arabia for nearly six years and, after Elsa's death, married a
local Arab woman who bore him his only child - a son. It was only in the late
1930s that he discovered that his parents had died in a Nazi concentration camp.

  Asad enjoyed a close friendship with King Ibn Saud. His love affair with
Arabia was more intense than those of his European predecessors: "In all my
years in Arabia, Ibn Saud's friendship has lain like a warm shimmer over my
life. He calls me his friend, although he is a king and I a mere journalist. I
call him my friend because on occasion he opens his innermost thoughts to me
as he opens his purse to so many others." 

  After more travelling, Asad went to British India and befriended Iqbal, the
spiritual father of the idea of a separate Pakistan, whom he admired greatly.
Iqbal persuaded Asad to abandon plans to travel to eastern Turkestan, China and
Indonesia and "to help elucidate the intellectual premises of the future Islamic
state". After partition and independence in 1947 Asad was appointed Head of the
Middle East Division at the Foreign Ministry. He firmly believed that the
creation of Pakistan was an historical necessity; "otherwise Muslims would
have been submerged in the much more developed and intellectually and
economically stronger Hindu society." 

  After an absence of 25 years from the West, Asad came to Paris and then to New
York in early 1952, serving as Pakistan's Minister Plenipotentiary to the United
Nations. He encountered much curiosity from his European and American friends
and colleagues, and here met his third wife, Pola Hamida; a Bostonian, whom
he married in 1952. 

  Asad's sojourn in the Muslim world was, as he put it, not a "mere outward
accommodation of a European to a Muslim community in which he happened to live".
His spiritual autobiography, The Road to Mecca (1954), which the Times Literary
Supplement called "a narrative of great power and beauty", covered the first
half of his life, including a journey in the summer of 1932 into the Empty
Quarter of the Arabian Desert, which confirmed his conversion to his new
belief, and "a conscious, whole-hearted transference of allegiance from one
cultural environment to another." 

  After two years in New York, the Asads travelled extensively before
returning to Pakistan in 1955, where Ayub Khan, then Commander-in-Chief of the
Army was keen for him to settle. (Years later President Zia ul-Haq made a simi-
lar request but Zia was killed before Asad could decide.) However, Asad's
chief ambition was to translate the Koran into English. First Switzerland and
then Morocco provided the setting for the preparation of his magnum opus The
Message of the Quran (1980) dedicated to "people who think". In its
intellectual engagement with the text and in the intimate, subtle and profound
understanding of the pure classical Arabic of the Koran, Asad's interpretation
is of a power and intelligence without rival in English. However, its dis-
tribution has been limited because of controversy among a minority of Muslim
extremists who dispute Asad's interpretation of one or two verses. 

  Much of the translation work and writing was done at the Villa Assadiya, near
Tangiers, where the Asads lived for 19 happy years. Asad's other works included
The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1978), Sahih Al-Bukhari: early
days of Islam (1978) and This Law of Ours and other Essays (1987). But,
disillusioned with the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, the war between Iran
and Iraq and the "fundamentalist" chaos in the Muslim world in general, the
Asads moved to Lisbon. 

  Asad was saddened by the intellectual insularity of the Muslim world, the
intolerance of the extremists, and was a powerful advocate of the rights of
Muslim women. It was Asad's insistence that the constitution of Pakistan allow
for the election of a woman leader that opened the way for Benazir Bhutto. "The
great mistake [of the Fundamentalists]," he once explained, "is that most of
these leaders start with the hudud, criminal punishment. This is the end result
of the sharia [Islamic law], not the beginning. The beginning is the rights of
people. There is no punishment in Islam which has no corresponding right." He
called for he codification of the sharia, suggesting a methodology in The
Principles of State and Government in Islam. 

  To Asad, the only real Islamic society existed during the time of the Prophet
Muhammad. The sharia, "as it is conceived today together with fiqh
[jurisprudence]", he argued, cannot be imple- mented because "it is too huge a
structure. But ... codified and reduced to its proper scope [it] can be
implemented." This view, together with his attack on the Islamic revolution
in Iran (he refused to acknowledge Khomeini as "The Imam"), which he consid-
ered a disaster for the Muslim world, made him a few powerful enemies. 

  His self-imposed "exile" from the Muslim world (echoing the frustrations in
his first book, Islam at the Crossroads, 1952) was, in retrospect, a mistake
and the Asads' move to Mijas was really to be nearer their Arab friends who vis-
ited Marbella regularly. The former Saudi Oil Minister Sheikh Yamani was a
patron of Asad for many years and the Emir Salman, Governor of Riyadh and
brother of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, invited the Asads to live in Saudi
Arabia - the "Homecoming of the Heart" for which Asad had been longing for many
years and which would have been the title of the second half of his autobiog-
raphy on which he was working till his death. 

Mushtaq Parker 

Leopold Weis (Muhammad Asad) journalist, writer, translator, diplomat and
traveller, born Lwow Galicia 2 July 1900, died Mijas Spain 20 February 1992. 

[Source: The Independent. Monday 23 March 1992]

-- 
Waseem A. Siddiqi                                 Tel:    (416) 922 1937 
SCO Canada                                        email: waseems@sco.com 
Toronto, Canada                                        uunet!sco!waseems
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: soc.culture.pakistan