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mk Studies 37:4 11 9981

ARCHIVES
MUHAMMAD ASAD AND THE ROAD TO MECCA
Text of Muhammad Asad's Interview with
Karl Gunter Simon
(fr.) ELMA Rum HARDER
The white village hangs on the cliffs over that sunny coastline about
which the Spaniards occasionally say: "Gibraltar might be ours once
again, but never again the COSia del Sol". With its old church, the
pilgrimage grotto, and the picturesque Plaza de Toros, the village is
ext remely interesting for anthropologists and sociologists , and has
inspired three books. Twenty years.ago eight thousand inhabitants lived
here. two thirds on their little farms in the fields . Their life was
burdensome. The villagers, excepting the large landowners, were bitterly
poor. "In this year. 1988", says the nice Danish woman at the foreign
office in Ayuntamiento , "we have 16,000 Spaniards and 32,000 mristas
residenles - cOllage dwellers from 52 countries" . The vegetables are
expensive, the fields have become trim residential gardens, the farmers
have become bricklayers and waiters, and innumerable bars serve fried
chicken or fish and chips , Donkeys carry tourists, and speedy mopeds
screech throughout the night. The village , hardly accessible by car
twenty years ago, appears today as one of the richest Spanish
communities . The new city hall costs three million Marks .
One of the thousands of new houses is called Dar al -Andalus . That
is the Arabic word for house. Although it appears Arabic-Spanish,
Elma Ruth Harder teaches at the Inlernational School of Islamabad, The
article was originally published in Frank/uner Allgemeillt lilung on November
18, 1988, The lranslator is gr3leFuilO Ron Peters for going through lhe fi rst
draft of the translation and for making valuable suggeslions.
534
<A., W T ~ " s""oNIMuhammbd And and n . ~ R<nd fa MecclI
Andalus actually has Gennan roots, The Vandals were the first Germans
10 seek the sun here.
An Afghan shepherd dog sits like a siame beyond the garden walL
A woman opens the door. She is North American. tells the curious taxi
driver. who has strayed out here for the first lime, ' ... and my husband
is Austrian-Pakistani", which all seems rather complicated. Which
language is best? "English". says the man at the door, "but Arabic and
Gennan are fine" . And a bit later: "Whom do you still know from the
Frank/llrter (Allgemeine) Zeitung? Benno Reinfenberg, Paul Medina or
Dr Heinrich Simon"? Personally. I know no one, not even Simon. In
Berlin? "J mel Ben Brecht in the Cafe des Westen, or was it in the
Romanisches Cafe? Marlene Dietrich ..... Murnau. Do you remember
Colin Ross"? Only the name. "We were the two travel reporters . Colin
Ross and I - yes, I. that is. Leopold Weiss . . .'
Leopold Weiss has been forgotten. Muhammad Asad is famous, at
least in the Islamic world. This year he turns 88.
"To achieve the rebirth of Islam we should not seek new models
from the outside . We just need to revive the old forgonen prinCiples .
Foreign cultures may give us new impulses, but the perfect workshop of
Islam cannot be replaced by anything un-Islamic, regardless of whether
it originates in the West or the East. The spiritual and social institutions
of Islam cann()( be improved upon. What seems to be the downfall of
Islam is in truth just the death and the emptiness in our hearts . ,, " A
polemic of the Muslim brotherhood? A proclamation of fundamentalists,
whoever they might be? Not at all. These modern statements are found
in an old book Islam at the Crossroads. written in 1933. This was the
first book by Muhammad Asad. but not quite the first for the author.
Twenty-four-year-old Leopold Weiss had written 'flIe Unromantic East.
reports published by the Frankfurter Zeitung. But with the second book,
his pen went on strike. He wanted 10 gel away from Frankfurt , home 10
the East . At thirty-two he wrote. "Far away. as in a dream, lies my
Western pas!. It is not unreal enough to be forgotten. and not real
enough to be a part of my present. Whenever I remain in a city for
several months, an unrest grows within me, an urging to do and to
move, towards the dry, fresh air of the desert, to the smelt of the camels
and their rocking gait. . . "
Heinr ich Simon, the nephew of Leopold Sonnemann. the founder of
the Frankfurter liitung, fired his star writer. Leopold Weiss became
Muhammad Asad . the reporter - a scholar of Islam.
Arab Muslims first told me of Muhammad Asad. [ read his
Principle of State and Government in !sIam, a slim publication which
/sYmJc Studies 37:4 11998)
gains weight with time as Muslims in politics seek their rools . And it
was Arabs who entrusted me with The Road to Mecca", the
autobiography that ends in 1932. Muhammad Asad decided, at 32, to
leave Arabia and travel eastward 10 India. From then on his biography
can only be reconstructed from fragments. Pakistan. New York, and
then . .. ? German Muslims told me they had seen the old Muhammad
Asad in Makkah as a pilgrim. He was living in Tangien. Finally a
German ambassador, himself a Muslim, pointed us in the right direction.
The white village, Dar al-Andalus. "He grants no interviews
anymore", Mrs Pola Hamida tens us, but the name Frankfurter has
perhaps made him sentimental. We sit at supper. Salmon from the
supermarket in Marbella and fresh black German bread. "The best
bread", says the old master, "was made by a baker in L'vov', I still have
the taste on my tongue". L'vov'! "Well. yes, Lemberg, that was then
Austria. Do you know that Lemberg comes from ' lowe' (lion), and
when I converled to Islam in Berlin in 1926, the Indian Imam said to me,
'you are called Leopold, and leo means lion - therefore we take the
Arabic name for lion, Asad' ".
L'vov, Lemberg in 190Cl was "a long street of somewhat dusty
elegance, lined by chestnut trees and laid with small wooden bricks
which muffle the hoofbeats of the horses and render every hour of the
day into a lazy afternoon. I loved this lovely street with a much greater
awareness than befit my young age, and not JUSt because it was my
childhood street. I loved it, I believe, for the stateliness with which it
flowed from the lively centre of that most lively of all cities gradually to
the edge of the city and then into the quiet of the woods and to the great
cemetery, which found itself in the midst of the forest. Beautiful wagons
passed occasionally on their rubber wheels to the lively, rhythmic trap-
trap of horse hooves . Yet in the winter, when the street was CQvered
foot-deep in snow, the sleighs flew over it and steam clouds issued from
the nostrils of the hones, and their bells jingled in the frosty air ... "
"Do you also find", says Mrs Pola Hamida at the supper table, "that
today the German written in the newspapers is wone than then"? Well,
yes. after the war, presumably under the influence of the Americans, a
magazine style took hold, and whoever has written such for a few years
can never get out of it. "No, no" , says the old Mr Weiss-As ad, "nO{ JUSt
in the Stern or Spiegel, but also in the newspapen. The Frankfurter
ZeilUlIg of that time ... "
In German, LwQw. AU proper names have lottn given their equivatent English
spellings.
536 _MIl GUtlIEA Asad and The Road 10
He learned Gennan from his father, Polish from his mother. His
father, a welJ. placed allorney, was born in the Bukovina region as son
of the rabbi at Czernowitz; his mother was the child of a rich banker in
L 'yav. Thirteen-year-old Leopold read Sienkiewicz in Polish, Karl May,
Nietzsche and Rilke in German, and the Torah and Talmud in Hebrew
and Aramaic,
"Theological and philosophical ways of thinking did not slir me
seriously at that time; that which I longed for deep inside did not
differentiate itself intrinsically from desires and expectations of other
boys my age - action aoo exercise and adventure, .. The firs! decade of
the European twentieth century stood under the sign of a spi ritual
emptiness. Most of the moral values, which for hundreds of years had
been considered steadfast, were shattered under the terrible jolt of the
world war, and no new values were at hand, to replace those which were
lost. All seemed fragile. A feeling of inner insecurity hovered over the
people, a premonition of conununal and spiritual revolution, which left
almost everyone doubting whether mankind's deed and thought would
ever again anain the old firmness and constancy. Everything seemed 10
flow there in a shapeless flood, and the spiritual unrest of youth was
unable to find a secure footing anywhere ". This trend is noteworthy and
well known. Also those who were born a generation later experienced
and discovered the same thing after Ihe end of the second world war in
this century.
Can man save himself by merely resorting to adventure, or does he
need any other deeds? He smuggled hilll'lelf, as a ful1grown fourteen-
year-old, into the Austrian army, but his father brought him back. When
he reached the age of military service, the war was almost over. He
experienced the University in Vienna, hunger in Prague, his first small
successes in Berl in. He worked as a theat rical assistant for Mumau as a
telephone operator, and finally, as a reporter for a news agency. "And
one day, in the spring of 1922, I received a letter from my Uncle
Dorian". Uncle Dorian, Viennese student of Freud. administered a
lunatic asylum in Jerusalem. "As he was a stranger to Zionism and had
not much use for Arabs and in addition was a bachelor, he felt himself
alone in a world which had nothing more 10 offer him than work and
income, and in this lonesomeness he remembered his nephew. And so I
found myself on the deck of a ship on my way to the East ".
The trip became a turning point in the life of the twenty-two-year-
old. "I stood face to face with a totally new sensation. A warm human
breath streamed from the blood of the Arabs in their thoughts and
gestures; there was none of that painful soul-splitting to be seen, those
's,.mi<; Studies 37:4 (1998)
531
ghosts of fear, greed and inner dispossession which made European life
so ugly and hopeless. Something began to open itself to me from the
Arabs, something which I had always unknowingly been seeking. There
was an emotional immediacy in every experience, an instinctive openness
to all questions of existence - a reason of the heart, one could say" .
Destiny or chance? He once again became a journalist. "I wrote an
essay on my impressions in Palestine and sent copies of it to ten German
papers, with the offer to report regularly from the Middle East . . .Just one
of the len accepted my offer - apparently impressed by my essay -
appointed me special correspondent to the Near East, and simultaneously
proposed the draft of a contract for a book which I should write on my
return. This paper was the Frankfurter Zeilung. Yet there was a hook
with it. Due to inflation, the Frankfurter Zeitung was not in the position
to pay me in English pounds. The honourarium offered to me, with a
certain apologetic gesture, looked very impressive in German currency,
but J knew very well, just as well as the editor's office, that it would
hardly suffice for the stamps to post my articles ' .
The reporter travelled . . . on foot, on horseback, on swaying
dromedaries. .. to Egypt. Syria. Transj ordan, Persia. He rode to
Afghanistan through the wilderness of Saudi Arabia. His articles made
him well known, not only in Germany, but also in the Arab press. He
learned Arabic and Persian and started to study the Qur'an and Muslim
writers. And in Berlin in 1926 he decided to take the incredibly unusual
step: he converted to Islam.
' I can, without exageration, say that at that point in my life, Islam
filled my thoughts to the ellclusion of all other problems. Gone were the
days when I wnsidered this teaching at my leisure and gave myself in a
carefree manner to those attractions which ellerted new and strange
weltanschauung and culture on my spirit. From then on my
preoccupation with Islam became a passionate search for truth. In
comparison to this search even the adventurous discovery of the previous
two years completely faded - so very faded that it was difficult for me
to gather myself together to write the new travel book to which the
Frankfurter Zei/wIg was entitled. Thoughts of the book became odious.
[ felt more and more impelled 10 make new discoveries , rather than to
write about the old ones" .
So it came to the break with the Frankfurter ZeilUng. The man with
the new name returned to the Orient and henceforth wrote for the Neue
Zurcher ZeilUng, the Dutch Telegraaf and the Kolnische 'ZeilUng under
the name Weiss-Asad.
Mrs Pola Hamida gets the photo album which she had put together
for her husband, after she had found the old negatives: clay palaces, the
author in Arab garb, his Bedouin wife with and without veil, many
famous leaders of the East who have long been history already-
luminaries like 'Abd al-'Aiil ibn Sa'lid, F a y ~ a l ; his son and heir, the
Great Sanilsi; Reza Khan, the late Shah of Persia. Actually, when one
sees his life, he must have been as famous as Lawrence of Arabia. Does
it depend on the name? ' Well, yes", says Muhammad Asad, smiling,
"Lawrence had a good biographer - Lowell Thomas made him famous'.
Lawrence has become an English legend. Though he was a friend of the
Arabs, he sti1J remained English. "And I - I crossed over to the other
camp' .
Henceforth he was a man of the Islamic world. 'Abd aJ -'AlIZ ibn
Sa'lid, the new King of Saudi Arabia, gave him his trust and friendship.
Six years in Riyad and MadTnah and long rides through the wilderness
made him into an Arab. He dressed as a Bedouin, spoke Bedouin Arabic,
and had a wife and child in Madinah. In 1929 he rode as a secret agent
for his Arab ruler to Kuwait. The English, he discovered, were
supponing the Beduoin uprising in the nonh against the central rule of
the King. Maria Theresa thalers and anns were landing in Kuwait . The
English wanted to weaken 'Abd al-'Alil and they planned a naval base
in the Persian Gulf and a rail line from Haifa to Basra. A series of
ankles by Muhammad Asad led to the collapse of these plans . Another
life threatening mission failed. The Great Saniisi who lived in Madinah
sent the young Muslim through British Egypt to Libya, where the Saniisi
Brotherhood fought desperately against the It alian invasion. The
messenger, chased by the Italians, turned back without having
accomplished anything. The guerilla fighters, cut off from all supplies,
died in concentration camps, on the gallows of the Italians. This proved
to be a quickly forgotten episode, but perhaps also a key to the character
of Libyan politics? The picture of King 'Abd al -'Aziz ibn Sa'lid has a
place of honour in the living room. "When King Faisal, Ibn Saud's son,
was murdered", says Mrs Pola Hamida, "I saw my husband cry for the
only time in his life".
And why did he become a Muslim? Was it the fascination of the
East? "I want to tell you a story", says Muhammad Asad. "During the
second world war. [ was interned in India. I was the only Muslim among
three thousand Nazis and a hundred Ami-Fascists. One day in the camp,
I came into conversation with the Prince of Lowenstein_ who was a Jesuit
and a missionary. 'You were born a Jew', he said to me, 'and naturally
the next step would be to become a Christian'. I asked him if he could
answer a question I had: 'What is the trinity'? ' Oh' _ said the Prince,
I$gmic SlVdi'l!l 31:4 (19981
539
'that is a mystery, when you have faith, then your hean will
understand . .. ' Do you see, that is why I am a Muslim. Islam says, 'Use
your intellect, and you will fmd faith' ". The dedication of his life's
work, the translation of the Qur'in, states: /i-qawmin ymajakkaran, "for
people who think". And what of the Sufis, the mystics? "Mysticism
means to deepen religious thinking and feeling. But the basis is not
feeling, it is intellect".
Up to this point Muhammad Asad has written his own life story, but
it is merely the first chapter of a long life. His autobiographical book,
The Road to Mecca, begins in Lemberg and ends in the Holy City, which
stands at the centre of the Islamic world. He was thiny-two years old
when he left the Arabs - and yet the book seems n()(ably complete, as
if he had finished his goal. "He is a Bedouin", says Mrs Pola, "we have
always wandered".
He possessed, however unsellled his life was, a gjft fo r making
friendships. He remained close to his Saudi friends all his life long. "[n
Medina I learned to know many Indian Muslims. I wanted to be in India
for a year". In Lahore, Muhammad Asad met Muhammad Iqbal, the
writer now honoured as spiritual father of Pakistan, and again a friend
determined his life's direction. He made a friend for life. Iqbal, surprised
by the sharp. outspoken young Muslim. persuaded him to stay in Lahore
and work for the cause of Islam. In 1933. Islam at the Crossroads
appeared. This was a book that held a clear mirror before all Muslims,
not just for the Indians. It showed hard realities and also the direction to
a new way.
"Islamic society is ossified", writes Asad. the lion. "It can absorb
the stimuli of a technically superior civilization, namely that of the West,
but it must return to its own roots, to overcome the decadence. Prophet
Muhammad had advocated the seeking of knowledge, the principle of
Ij lihad, the eJtertion of one's own jUdgment, was the basis of the great
Arab civilzation. European thought. the age of science which has lasted
till now, would not have occurred without the stimuli of the Arabs.
Thanks to Islam, the European Renaissance freed itself of the chains of
the church of the middle ages, for the science of the Arabs and the
Persians had its roots in the teachings of the Prophet. Only in the
following centuries when the Abbasids and Mamluks ruled, was the door
of ijtihad locked. The principle of taqlid - blind acctptence wilhout
one's own judgmem - ruled and created the decadence of the Islamic
world". Muhammad Asad later told the periodical Arabia: "To turn away
the evil of Western civilization is one thing; to accept their benefits is
540
. ..... GONHR SlMONlMuhllmmMl Asod and ~ RQ8d to Mece,
another. I likely would have never become a Muslim if the schools of
Europe had not instructed my understanding ".
A critic of his books writes that Muhammad Asad was against the
politicians and against the "mullahs. With Ihis statement in fact he has
hit the sore exactly. Till today the Islamic world is looking for this
narrow way which runs between two rocks and promises salvation. The
politicians open themselves up [0 Westernizati on and thereby give up
their roots; the mullahs hold fast to their roots, but they become rigid.
The politicians - Bbulla in Pakistan or the Shah of Persia - have failed
up to now; the rigid mullahs, as in Khomeini ' s Iran, offer no promising
future perspecti ve. The right way leads through the middle. that also is
wisdom of the Qur'an, an instruction for "people who think ' , /i-qawmin
yata/akkarW! .
In 1946 Asad went to Kashmir and founded a periodical, which he
himself wrote. It was called Am/at like the plain before the gates of
Makkah where pilgrims spend the 9th day of Dhu']-Hijjah in huge
camps . In 1941 Pakistan was born as the only modern state to be
established on the fundamentals of Islam. In the bloody disorder which
accompanied the partitioning of British India, even the library of tbe
scholar was destroyed. His translation of the Hadith of Bukhari, that
monumental collection of teachings of the Prophet [peace be on him].
was never completed. The scholar who at one lime had been a reponer
then moved into pol it ics. The government called him to the Department
of Islamic Reconstruction, whose mandate was to build the ideological
framework for the new Islamic state.
"He has forgotten a few years", says Muhanunad Asad. From 19)9
to 1945 he sat in an internment camp. "I was the only Muslim, and the
Muslim soldiers who watched me wanted to let me escape, but I steered
away from that". And what did he do in the camp, for six long years?
"Nothing. We were housed in seventy-man barracks. What could we do
there? Once, at Christmas, we fought with the Fascists - we won,
because we were sober and they were drunk ".
' Six years - a man's best years ", says Mrs Pola. "The black hole
is a richly coloured biography. We have forgotten it ". The black hole:
things forgonen, repressed , flashes of intense memories which sink back
into the merciful darkness. "My father disappeared in Theresienstadt.
After the Anschluss I had supplied him with a visa to the Punjab, but he
did not want to flee without his daughter. When I also sent my sister a
visa, she lost the letter. She died in Auschwitz".
"Tell the story about the oil", says Mrs Pola.
fst.mic Studies 37:4 (1 9981
5"
"Oh, yes, the English accused me, as confidant of Ibn Sa'ud, of
obtaining the oil concession for the Americans and not the English, It
was all madness" .
"Then we would be millionaires today", says Mrs Pola.
In 1949 Muhammad Asad joined the diplomatic service of Pakistan.
He, of course, took charge of the Middle East Departmeru. In 1950 he
went back to visit Arabia . "There was still flO passpon law, I declined
to travel with a British passport and received the very first Pakistani
passpon". Until then he had had an old Austrian passpon. He replied to
a written summons from the German consul to become a pan-German
citizen with his response "GOtz from Berlichingen' . In 1952 Pakistan
sent him as representative to the UN in New York. As Chairman of the
Commission of Non-Selfgoverned Territories , he argued for the
independence of Tunisia. Burgiba later invited him as a state guest.
In New York, the third chapter in the life of Muhammad Asad-
Leopold Weiss began. He met Pola. This American woman had become
a Muslim even before she met the diplomat. "He fascinated me ' . she
recalls , "with his brilliance". (Asad now divorced his wife from Saudi
Arabia.j The Pakistan Foreign Office refused to agree to the marriage.
Asad quickly decided, as he often had in life, to leave the diplomatic
service: he started to write once more .
The Road to Mecca appeared in nine months, the story of his youth
and his conversion. The book was a success, and fIOt only in Muslim
oountries. "Allah alone knows", wrote the periodical Arabia thirty years
later, "how many other convens were on their way to faith because of
this rousing book'. It was translated into Japanese, Malaysian. Serbo-
Croatian and nine other languages. The film version with Gregory Peck
as Muhammad Asad, remained a plan. The publisher, Gottfried
Beermann-Fischer, who met the author in New York, invited him to
write the German version in Germany. For a year, Leopold Weiss-Asad
lived with his wife Pola in Badenweiler, in the house of Annette Kolb.
The Black Forest had 00 more hold on him than did Frankfun. The
East beckoned him again, as unromantic as if was. He spem two years
in Beirut, where he wrote The Principles of State and Government in
Islam, a bri11iant theory of the Islamic state, going back to the roots of
the Qur'lin and the Sunnah. He lived in Pakistan another year, then again
attempted to find his way back to Europe to his own roots. He lived in
Switzerland for six yeaTli, where he started his major work, the English
translation of the Qur'an. "I calculated it would take two years, then it
became seventeen years. One digs deeper and deeper".
542
These were modes! words for a major work. Whoever pages
through the book's thousand dense pages must think, 'Oh good, one of
eighty-five English translations', but then one gets lost in the fullness of
the commentary, the richness of the thought, which builds a bridge
between two worlds. And doesn't just seek counsel of the authorities
like BukharT, Ibn Rushd to 'Abduh. He has learned the
complex language at its source with Ibe Bedouins in tbe Arabian
wilderness.
"All translators", he writes in the forward, were people who
acquired their knowledge of Arabic through academic study alone: thai
is, from books. But the Arabic of the Quran is the language of a people
endowed with that pe1:uliar quick-wittedness which the desert and its
expanses inspires, the language of people whose mental images quickly,
and without mediation, fly, flowing without effort from association to
association- sequences of thought that slowl y approach the idea which
they aim to ellpress".
Every translation of such a language will necessarily be ils own
interpretation. The famous ayah 190 in Sara( al-Baqarah, to give just one
example, is translated by Asad like this: And fight in God's cause
against those who wage war against you, but do not commit
- for, verily, God does oot love aggressors", The oldest reference to
jihiul, the idea which is so often misunderstood in the West, is here
clearly defined: a prohibition of offensive war, a for
defense,
Asad the key to understanding of this great and mysterious
book in the SUrah AI-'Intrall, dyah 7: "He it is who has bestowed upon
thee front Oil high this divine writ, containing messages that are clear in
and by themselves - and these are the essence of the divine writ - as
well as others that are allegoricaL Now those whose hearts are given to
swerving from the truth go after that part of tbe divine writ which has
been ellpressed in allegory, seeking out (what is bound to create)
confusion, and seeking (to arrive at) its final meaning (in an arbitrary
manner); but none save God knows its final meaning".
"It is this verse", conunenls Asad, "in its absolute sense, which
gives the key to undersfaooing the Quranic message which makes the
whole accessible to the people who think",
The unambiguous signs (ayar muhkamdt) have but one meaning, but
the allegorical signs (dydt mutaslulbiMt) spell out what lies beyond the
human cognition. " It is this conctp( that builds the foundation for the
understanding of the Quran and the principles of religion in general, for
all religious knowledge builds on the fact that only a small portion of the
Isl.mic Studms 37:4 (1998)
'"
reality of human thought and human fantasy is accessible and the larger
ponion is locked from comprehension".
Asad cont inuall y emphasizes the rationality of Islam: "Most surely
the Quran is disregarded in the West because in one aspect it differs
from all other scriptures: it stresses reason as a way to faith, and it
assens the inseparability of the spiritual and the physical spheres of
human existence".
The Message of the Qur'lln appeared in 1980, the author's eightieth
year of life, the culmination of a life's work which began with travel
pictures on the first page of the FranJifurter Zeitung. The reporter
viewed; the politician did; the wise man understood. These have been the
three chapters of his life. Lawrence of Arabia pales into insignificance.
In 1987, after fourteen years in T"flgiers, and then four years in
Portugal, Muhammad Asad moved to Marbella, where the Arabs live in
the summer.
When I visited him, he had just moved again. to the white village
we cannot name. The man wants his peace.
In one of his essays, he speaks of "mutual distrust" between Arabs
aoo Europeans. He explains it like this: ' It still stems from the time of
the crusades. The European encounters other strange religions, say
Buddhism, without prejudice, but the aversion to Islam lies deep in his
unconscious". Doesn't it also lie in the character of the Arabs, whom we
Europeans have a hard time understanding? Arabs seem, especially in
association with journalists, often locked and inaccessible. "No, no,
Arabs are open and good-natured". says Asad, who has never felt
himself so much at home with friends as in Saudi Arabia.
At that time, I add. there were no terrorists, no fanatic combat
organizations like Hizb Allah or al-Jihad-al-lslami. Isn't it understandable
that the people of the West become shocked with Khomeni ? "Khomeni
has done for Islam what Hitler did for Germany', says Muhammad
Asad. He smiles, "He was, by the way. born in the same year as I".
He takes off his glasses. "Have you read Koestler - The Thirteenth
Race? Koestler has maintained that the Ashkinazi, the Eastern Jews,
didn't even descend from the Jews, but from the Chasaren, the
descendents of a Turkish race from the Central Steppes, from where the
Mongols also came. Look at me ... " Age has drawn his features sharper,
the cheekbones protrude, the eyes lie in narrow slits. "And when you
speak of fanaticism, the Quran clearly says in the second Surah, We have
wished thai you be a people of the middle way. The Sunnah prohihits
{aftit and ifrat, excess in small things as in large things. In the Sunnah
54'
it also says, God has wished that which is easy for you, not the
difficult " .
In the evening. with chocolate mousse in the village tavern, he
lapses into silence. ' Say something", says Mrs Poia, "I'm considering",
says the old Bedouin quietly, "whether or not we should move again ... "
It really is too lonely in [he white village, among all the turistas
residentes.