The Road To Mecca

[Al Furqaan]

Assalaamu Alaikum,


Has anyone read the book "The Road To Mecca" - by Muhammad Asad.


A mesmerzing tale of a man's spiritual journey. Very important in historical context of the early 19th century.

[Muslimah]

Bismillah


as salam alykom


As for me I didnt read the book, jazakum Allah khairan for the note

[Al Furqaan]

Though this paragraph can hardly do justice to Md. Asad, it gives u a very brief glimpse of who he was. Here is an excerpt from an article written on him.


Leopold of Arabia


By Amir Ben-David


From The Israeli daily Haaartez a few weeks after September 11, 2001


Born in 1900 to a Jewish family in Lvov, Leopold Weiss died nine years ago as Muhammad Assad, a pious Muslim who helped create the country of Pakistan. While meeting the founding fathers of Zionism in Palestine in the 1920s, he dared to voice criticism of the movement's dismissal of the Arab presence in the land - a phenomenon that still haunts the region today. The riveting story of a Jew who changed his name, his faith, his wives, his nationality - and the face of the Islamic world.


The surging patriotism that was unleashed by the September 11 attacks continues to gain momentum. Television programs and the major magazines are still preoccupied with the subject of Islam and Muslims, and with the overriding question: Why do they hate America? The phrase most bandied about in discussions is "clash of civilizations."


Talal Assad - a Muslim intellectual who holds American citizenship and was born in Saudi Arabia, raised in India, came of age in Pakistan, studied in England and lives in New York - hates no one and objects vehemently to the "clash of civilizations"
theory. If the family story he relates has a *universal message of any kind, it's that civilizations don't necessarily have to clash. The fact is they coexisted harmoniously in the biography of at least one person: his father.



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Here is a passage from the book:


And Khadija said: 'O my uncle's son, hark to this thy kinsman I' And when Muhammad recounted what he had experienced, Waraqa raised his arms in awe and said: 'That was the Angel of Revelaton, the same whom God had sent to His earlier prophets. Oh, would I were a young man! Would that I be alive, and able to help thee when thy people drive thee away!' Whereupon Muhammad asked in astonishment: 'Why should they drive me away?' And the wise Waraqa replied: 'Yes, they will. Never yet came a man to his people with the like thou hast come with but was persecuted.'


And persecute him they did, for thirteen years, until he forsook Mecca and went to Medina. For the Meccans had always been hard of heart . . .


. . . . . . . . . . . .


BUT, AFTER ALL, IS IT SO difficult to understand the hardness of heart most of the Meccans displayed when they first heard Muhammad's call? Devoid of all spiritual urges, they knew only practical endeavours: for they believed that life could be widened only by widening the means by which outward comfort might be increased. To such people, the thought of having to surrender themselves without compromise to a moral claim -for Islam means, literally, 'self-surrender to God'- may well have seemed unbearable. In addition, the teaching of Muhammad threatened the established order of things and the tribal conventions so dear to the Meccans. When he started preaching the Oneness of God and denounced idol worship as the supreme sin, they saw in it not merely an attack on their traditional beliefs but also an attempt to destroy the social pattern of their lives. In particular, they did not like Islam's interference with what they regarded as purely 'mundane' issues outside the purview of religion -like economics, questions of social equity, and people's behaviour in general -for this interference did not agree too well with their business habits, their licentiousness and their views about the tribal good. To them, religion was a personal matter -a question of attitude rather than of behaviour .


Now this was the exact opposite of what the Arabian Prophet had in mind when he spoke of religion. To him, social practices and institutions came very much within the orbit of religion, and he would surely have been astonished if anyone had told him that religion was a matter of personal conscience alone and had nothing to do with social behaviour. It was this feature of his message that, more than anything else, made it so distasteful to the pagan Meccans. Had it not been for his interference with social problems, their displeasure with the Prophet might well have been less intense. Undoubtedly they would have been annoyed by Islam in so far as its theology conflicted with their own religious views; but most probably they would have put up with it after some initial grumbling -just as they had put up, a little earlier, with the sporadic preaching of Christianity -if only the Prophet had followed the example of the Christian priests and confined himself to exhorting the people to believe in God, to pray to Him for salvation and to behave decently in their personal concerns. But he did not follow the Christian example, and did not confine himself to questions of belief, ritual and personal morality. How could he ? Did not his God command him to pray: Our Lord, give us the good of this world as well as the good of the world to come ?


In the very structure of this Koranic sentence, 'the good of this world' is made to precede 'the good of the world to come’: firstly, because the present precedes the future and, secondly, because man is so constituted that he must seek the satisfaction of his physical, worldly needs before he can listen to the call of the spirit and seek the good of the Hereafter. Muhammad's message did not postulate spirituality as something divorced from or opposed to physical life : it rested entirely on the concept that spirit and flesh are but different aspects of one and the same reality of human life. In the nature of things, therefore, he could not content himself with merely nursing a moral attitude in individual persons but had to aim at translating this attitude into a definite social scheme which would ensure to every member of the community the greatest possible measure of physical and material well-being and, thus, the greatest opportunity for spiritual growth.


He began by telling people that Action is part of faith: for God is not merely concerned with a person's beliefs but also with his or her doings -especially such doings as affect other people besides oneself. He preached, with the most flaming imagery that God had put at his disposal, against the oppression of the weak by the strong. He propounded the unheard-of thesis that men and women were equal before God and that all religious duties and hopes applied to both alike; he even went so far as to declare, to the horror of all right-minded pagan Meccans, that a woman was a person in her own right, and not merely by virtue of her relationship with men as mother, sister, wife or daughter, and that, therefore, she was entitled to own property, to do business on her own and to dispose of her own person in marriage! He condemned all games of chance and all forms of intoxicants, for, in the words of the Koran, Great evil and some advantage is in them, but the evil is greater than the advantage. To top it all, he stood up against the traditional exploitation of man by man; against profits from interest-bearing loans, whatever the rate of interest; against private monopolies and 'corners' ; against gambling on other people's potential needs -a thing we today call 'speculation' ; against judging right or wrong through the lens of tribal group sentiment- in modern parlance, 'nationalism'. Indeed, he denied any moral legitimacy to tribal feelings and considerations. In his eyes, the only legitimate -that is, ethically admissible -motive for communal groupment was not the accident of a common origin, but a people's free, conscious acceptance of a common outlook on life and a common scale of moral values.


In effect, the Prophet insisted on a thorough revision of almost all the social concepts which until then had been regarded as immutable, and thus, as one would say today, he 'brought religion into politics' : quite a revolutionary innovation in those times.


The rulers of pagan Mecca were convinced, as most people at all times are, that the social conventions, habits of thought and customs in which they had been brought up were the best that could ever be conceived. Naturally, therefore, they resented the Prophet's attempt to bring religion into politics -that is, to make God-consciousness the starting point of social change -and condemned it as immoral, seditious and 'opposed to all canons of propriety' .And when it became evident that he was not a mere dreamer but knew how to inspire men to action, the defenders of the established order resorted to vigorous counteraction and began to persecute him and his followers. . .


In one way or another, all prophets have challenged the 'established order' of their times; is it therefore so surprising that almost all of them were persecuted and ridiculed by their kinsfolk ? -and that the latest of them, Muhammad, is ridiculed in the West to this day ?


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[SisterJennifer]

Asalaamu alikum,


I have read this book. He is masha Allah a very gifted writer. I know there is alot of hype about him in some circles. And while his ideas and opinions may be thought provoking, I think we should remember he is just a man.


Asalaamu alikum

[Muslimah]

Bismillah


Mash a Allah I must say I really enjoyed the read, specially the fact that he was a jew yet also founder of Islamic Pakistan. sobhan Allah.