Mohammad Asad - Leopold Weiss

He was a journalist, a writer, a linguist, a thinker, a reformer, a diplomat, a political theorist, a scholar and translator of the Holy Qur’an. The intellectuals are perplexed. How so many qualities could be centered in one soul. He was born a Jew in a religious family, then converted to Christianity and finally to Islam.

There he found peace and there he gained strength. It is said that he was one of the “most powerful European convert” to Islam of the 20th century. His story of the Journey to Islam, which he entitled as “The Road to Mecca” is a challenging book of the century. He was a great scholar. He received religious education and was proficient in Hebrew from an early age, as well as familiar with Aramaic. He studied the Old Testament, the text and commentaries of the Talmud, the Mishna and Gemara, also delving into the intricacies of Biblical exegesis and the Targum.

He went to Cairo where he tried to learn Arabic and spent some time with Shaikh Mustafa Maraghi (who later became the Shaikh of Al-Azhar). He wanted to gain a fuller picture of Islam. Subsequently he became perfect in English, Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic and German languages to explore the depth of the three Revealed religions.

Mohammad Asad was born “Leopold Weiss” on July 2, 1900 to a Jewish family in Lemberg, which until 1918 was part of Austria and afterward until 1939 was part of the second Polish Republic (present day Lviv, Ukraine). Weiss was a descendant of a long line of Jewish rabbis. After abandoning university in Vienna, Weiss drifted aimlessly around 1920s Germany, working briefly for the expressionist film director, Fritz Lang.

Leopold’s grandfather, an orthodox rabbi in Crzernowitz, Bukovina, had wanted his father to follow the family’s rabbinical tradition, but he chose to be a barrister. One day, Leopold left home, shaved off his beard and side -locks and after drifting for a while, he arrived at Oxford. He graduated as a scholar, converted to Christianity, married a ‘gentile’ and sent a letter of divorce to his Jewish wife.

Leopold later moved to the British Mandate of Palestine, staying in Jerusalem at the house of his uncle Dorian Feigenbaum (a disciple of Sigmund Freud), his mother’s youngest brother, who had invited him to Jerusalem to live in his delightful old Arab stone house.

But neither Dorian nor Jerusalem could stop Leopold from his wanderings. He became a correspondent for Frankfurter Zeitung reporting sometimes in Cairo, sometimes in Amman, back to Jerusalem; and on road again to Syria which then included Lebanon as well and Turkey. It was a moment at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, that he became aware how near their God and their faith were to these Muslim people. Weiss’ assignments led him to an ever-deepening engagement with an understanding of Islam, which, after much thought and deliberation, led to his religious conversion.

The cobbler’s advice: Islam had been revealing itself to Leopold in bits and pieces, but it was on a winter day in Afghanistan that a man, fixing an iron shoe to his horse, told him: “But thou art a Muslim, only thou dost not know it thyself. Why don’t you say now and here: ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet’ and become a Muslim, in fact as you already are, in your heart,” said the man.

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