Muhammad Asad - the first Citizen of Pakistan

Muhammad Asad - The First Citizen of Pakistan

M. Ikram Chaghatai

abstract

As deputy secretary in charge of the middle east division of foreign ministry, asad prepared a memorandum for creation of something like a league of muslim nations, and having discussed it with prime minister liaquat ali khan, he officially toured saudi arabia, egypt and syria. Liaquat’s assassination, however, put an end to his plans for uniting the muslim nations. On his return, he submitted a report on his middle east tour to foreign minister sir zafarullah khan, who read it through and put it aside.

Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad’s (1900-1992) reputed autobiographical travelogue, entitled The Road to Mecca, covers only a third of his long life and ends as he enters his home after his conversion (1926), first in Berlin and then in Cairo, with his German wife. Afterwards, he spent about fifteen years in India where he met Iqbal (1934) who advised him to abandon his plans of further traveling and “to remain in India to help elucidate the intellectual premises of the future Islamic State.” As a humble young follower, his whole Weltanschauung (world outlook) was changed by Iqbal, who set him out on a path that ultimately led him “to a revival of all the dormant hopes of Islam, the creation of a political entity of the people bound together not by common descent but by their common adherence to an ideology.” In view of Asad’s intellectual capabilities, scholarly accomplishments, marvelous exposition of Islamic concepts and personal experiences of the contemporary Muslim world, Iqbal tried to appoint him as the chairman of the department of Islamic Studies in one of the local colleges, but for certain reasons Asad could not accept it. 

 Whenever Asad came to Lahore he visited Iqbal, and they spent many an hour talking about the prospect of Pakistan. They discussed in detail the forms in which the future Islamic State of Pakistan should be organized and the ways and means to persuade the Muslim political leaders to stand up boldly for their common ideal. Following Iqbal’s advice, Asad wrote a series of articles about why Pakistan had to be established and had them published in various European newspapers and periodicals; some of those articles appeared also in an Urdu translation in a leading newspaper of Lahore. In addition, Asad delivered some lectures on the same subject in Lahore and Delhi. As stated by Asad himself, it had been Iqbal who was the first to formulate, in clear-cut political terms, the idea of an Islamic State in North India and who thus gave it body and life. In fact, Asad devoted all his efforts to bring into reality Iqbal’s dream of an ideological Islamic state.

During the Second World War, Asad's Austrian citizenship put him in imprisonment by the Indian government and the six years he spent in an internment camp made him more conscious about the significance of freedom for all human beings. No doubt, this incident intensified his aspirations for a separate homeland for the Indian Muslims.

Soon he started a monthly periodical named Arafat that was primarily a vehicle for Asad’s ideas, aiming at a fundamental reconstruction of our approach to the problem of Shariah. This journalistic monologue of Asad was to be a clarion-call at the critical time of Pakistan Movement. Three months before Pakistan came into being, he wrote an article under the title “What do we mean by Pakistan?” in which he emphasized the real purpose underlying the future establishment of Pakistan: that purpose did not consist in merely providing more economic opportunities or posts to Muslims but, rather, in enabling them to live effectively as Muslims and to realize the spirit of Islam in their political forms, in their laws and social institutions. In another issue, published less than a month before the Independence Day, Asad penned a lengthy essay entitled “Towards an Islamic Constitution” and it was the first attempt ever made to outline the principles which must be incorporated in the constitution of any state that claims to be ‘Islamic’. Asad’s thoughtful studies were destined to become the first step in the development of our modern political thought and for this reason he can be rightly called as one of the intellectual founders of Pakistan.

After going through the harrowing experiences of Partition (1947), Asad reached Lahore and settled here. Two months after Pakistan appeared on the map of the world, Nawab of Mamdot, the first Chief Minister of West Punjab, contacted Asad for establishing a special department to work out the ideological premises on which Pakistan should rest. Asad accepted this proposal and within a few days the scheme was set forth in a formal Memorandum, the budget estimate discussed and approved in conjunction with the Head of the Finance Department, and an official notification issued. The Department of Islamic Reconstruction– the first government institution with which the word `Islamic’ appeared– came into existence. Explaining the aims and objectives of this newly created Department in a radio talk on 18th October 1947, Asad proposed to make it a sort of “clearing-house” of ideas and endeavours aiming at religious and social uplift of the Muslim Ummah. Though it was his ‘baby’, he had to leave it under the pressure of Liaquat Ali Khan, the Prime Minister, and join the Foreign Service as Deputy Secretary in charge of the Middle East Division.

This Division comprised the whole Arab world, including North Africa, as well as Iran. Asad had very definite ideas as to the policies which Pakistan ought to pursue in that part of the world. Soon he prepared a long, explicit memorandum for the Foreign Minister, Sir Zafrullah Khan, outlining his policy proposals in some detail. On completion, this memorandum contained some outspoken criticism of the policies pursued by the Government until then. In this confidential document, Asad emphatically recommended immediate cooperation with the Arab States for creation of something like a League of Muslim Nations and having discussed it with the Prime Minister, he officially toured Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria with the very first passport marked “citizen of Pakistan”. At the end of this diplomatic mission, he received the news of Liaquat Ali Khan’s assassination (1951), which proved a full stop to his plans for uniting Muslim nations. On his return, he submitted a report on his Middle East tour to the Foreign Minister, Sir Zafrullah Khan, who read it through carefully and then put it aside. Thus, Asad's enthusiasm for Muslim unity became a file in the archives of the Foreign Ministry.

In 1951, Asad’s work at the Middle East Division came to an end and he was appointed as the second-in-command to the Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Patras Bukhari, with the rank of Minister Plenipotentiary. Asad and his boss did not know one another personally and they never tried to be friendly. In consequence, their mutual relations were always strained and they never had the feeling that they were members of one and the same ‘team’ working towards common ends.

By chance, at a reception Asad met Pola, an American of Polish origin who was destined to become his third wife (d. 2007). She was a young, beautiful and intelligent woman. He fell in love with her and when he came to know that she had already embraced Islam he decided to marry her, despite the difference of age and temperament. But under the rules of the Foreign Office, he was bound to get prior permission to marry a non-Pakistani national. He applied through proper channel but the Governor-General rejected his application. So, he submitted his resignation from the Foreign Service, divorced his Arabian wife (Munira, d. 1978) and in the inspiring company of his new wife, he sat down and wrote his extraordinary book entitled The Road to Mecca.

After a lapse of few years, Asad, while living in Beirut, received an invitation from the Vice-Chancellor of the Punjab University, Mian Afzal Husain (1869-1970), to organize an International Islamic Colloquium in Lahore. As he had for some time been considering return to Pakistan, he decided to accept the invitation. Apparently, this Colloquium seems to have been the continuation of an International Islamic Conference which was held in Princeton in 1954 under the aegis of the Princeton University and the American Congress. Several eminent Western and Eastern scholars participated in it and emphasized the need for rapid growth of social, commercial and political relationship between Muslims and those others of the Graeco-Roman heritage. 

They also felt that in the context of an insidious threat of Communism and the hideous distress it caused all around, there could indeed be some enduring value in genuine co-operation with the moral-intellectual force of Islam. Sayyid Amjad Ali, Ambassador of Pakistan in America, was deeply impressed by its scholarly presentations and started thinking about holding such an awe-inspiring assemblage of savants in Pakistan. Afterwards, as a Finance Minister, he allocated an amount of seven lakh rupees for this purpose and a Colloquium Committee, comprising representatives of the six Pakistan universities, relevant Departments of the Government, and distinguished independent scholars, was organized to select subjects for discussion in this Colloquium and decide matters of policy concerning its organization and management.

In March 1957, this Colloquium Committee, with the approval of the Government, appointed Asad at a salary of fifteen hundred rupees per month to make suitable arrangements for holding the Conference and edit/publish the papers submitted on this occasion. In his first meeting with the Vice-Chancellor of the Punjab University, basically an agriculturist, Asad had the impression that Mr. Husain disliked him and was perhaps unhappy at his choice as organizer of the Colloquium. But Asad, with his profound knowledge of Islam, his complete command of the Arabic language and his acquaintance with many of the personalities who were to participate in the Conference, was the logical choice for organizing it.

Gradually, the differences between Asad and the Vice-Chancellor became more intense. Although Asad was supposed to have a free hand in the choice of scholars to be invited to the Colloquium, Afzal Husain kept interfering and questioning the right of this or that person to be invited, and suggesting some definitely inappropriate ones. It had been decided upon the outset that there would have to be more or less ‘official’ delegations from all the Muslim countries, which was a somewhat delicate issue because of the obtrusive presence of Jamal Abdul Nasir in and outside Egypt, but Asad believed that it would be possible to accommodate both pro-Nasir and anti-Nasir elements, since this was presumably to be a scholarly conference. Another conflicting issue of translating the presentations from English to Arabic and vice versa worsened the situation. 

Finally, Asad decided to hand over the work to the Vice-Chancellor himself and to step aside. From the beginning, his wife, Pola, was assisting him as his private secretary without having any `position’ or salary, so in the first week of December 1957, about three weeks before the inauguration of the Colloquium, she personally met the Vice-Chancellor and gave him all the typed English and Arabic letters and other relevant documents. At that time, everything had already been accomplished and even the air tickets had been issued, and it did not much matter to Asad that he would not even be a participant in the Colloquium. After two years (1960), when its proceedings came out, one could not even find his name there. What revenge a Vice-Chancellor had taken on a scholar like Asad who had a high standing both in Pakistan and in the entire Muslim world!

Full of disgust, Asad returned to Europe via Karachi where his old friend Mumtaz Masan, Finance Secretary, came up with a proposal which would perhaps change his mind. Asad was offered the co-directorship of a soon-to-be established Institute of Islamic Research. But it was too late, and in any case he had rightly tried resigning from– or being pushed out of Government posts– and he realized all too well that a co-directorship could never work, even with the best of will on both sides.

Again, during his stay in Switzerland, Asad received a letter from the President of Pakistan, General Ayub Khan, who was a great admirer of his book named The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961). In a subsequent exchange of letters, he proposed to Asad to come to Pakistan and have the membership of a seven-man group of Muslim scholars– who both supposedly knew the world and were experts on Islam– to advise him with regard to everyday matters as well as the drawing up of a new Islamic constitution for the country. At that time, Asad was immersed in his cherished work on the Qur’an, and so he regretfully declined.

After many years, Asad was again invited by another President of Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq, in 1983 and that was his last visit to this country. When he arrived at Islamabad, which he had not yet seen, he was received at the plane with great honour and escorted to the Presidency. During his sojourn in Islamabad, there was a series of meetings with members of the Ansari Commission in order to prepare a kind of programme for the President for the future. Asad agreed with some, and as usual disagreed with others, which he found retrograde. On one point he was firm and insistent that Muslim women should have exactly the same rights in the political sphere as had men, to the extent of becoming Prime Minister.

Asad also spared some time to meet with his surviving friends in Lahore and Islamabad and at the request of the President made several radio and television appearances, as always spontaneous. On his return to Portugal, he was besieged by letters from literally hundreds of admirers in Pakistan, offering him land, a house, everything but he refused politely, as his concept of Pakistan was beyond all these worldly trivialities.

Asad loved Pakistan, his conception of Pakistan, even when it turned its back on him, and he never felt resentment at the treatment he had received from it. He remained a citizen– the first citizen of Pakistan– until the end, although he had been strongly tempted to accept the generous, spontaneous gestures of many heads of Islamic States to have their citizenship and passport, which would have made his life so much easier.

Asad contributed so much to Pakistan’s early political and cultural life but was unfortunately shunted from the corridors of power. He served this country as the head of the Directorate of Islamic Reconstruction, Joint Secretary of the Middle East Division in Foreign Office, Minister Plenipotentiary to the United Nations and organizer of the International Islamic Colloquium. If we delve into the archival material of these government departments, the role played by Asad for his beloved Pakistan can be dealt with in detail. But here an important question arises: where are the relevant official documents housed? Nobody knows.

In his youth Asad heard a voice of an old man in Kurdistan: “If water stands motionless in pools, it becomes stale, muddy and foul; only when it moves and flows does it remain clear. Absolutely true. Physically, Asad is no more, but he is and will always be a part of our memory. According to a mystical dictum, he who lives in your memory never dies.

http://www.allamaiqbal.com/publications/journals/review/aproct09/9.htm

Muhammad Asad - The Quran translators and my mentor

It is such a delight to read about Muhammad Asad, Insha Allah, I will be posting another item about him written by his don today.
Mike Ghouse

From Leopold Weiss to Muhammad Asad

The Impact International

  
 

Writer, traveller and explorer, Muhammad Asad had a truly chequered life spanning three continents and two cultures. Born Leopold Weiss in the summer of 1900 in the Polish city of Lwow, then under Austrian empire, he was 14 when he escaped school and joined the Austrian army under a false name, only to be recovered by his father and taken home, now in Vienna. But about four years later when he was drafted in the army, he had ceased to have any longing for a military career. He was lucky. The Austrian Empire collapsed a few weeks after and he went on to study history of art and philosophy at the University of Vienna.      His father wanted him to get a Ph. D. Leopold wanted to try his hand at journalism and one summer day in 1920 he boarded the train for Prague. In doing so, he had followed in the foot-steps of his own father and a great-great-uncle. One of his great-great-uncles had been a rabbi. One day, he left home, shaved off his beard and sidelocks 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. The uncle became a distinguished astronomer and a university don and given British knighthood. In the family, however, his name was never mentioned aloud. Nor does Asad himself record it.     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. For Leopold, however, he made sure that by the age of 13, he not only read Hebrew with great fluency, but also speak it freely and have a fair acquaintance with Aramaic. The young boy studied the Old Testament in the original; the Mishna and Gemara that is, the text and commentaries of the Talmud and became immersed in the intricacies of Biblical exegesis, called ‘Targum’.     From Prague Leopold went to Berlin, but there was no journalistic job for this total novice. His lucky break came when the famous director, F.W. Murnau, took him as a temporary assistant for two months. The experience gave him self-confidence as well as opportunity to flirt with the leading lady of the film – a well-known and a very beautiful actress. His next job was writing a film scenario along with a friend. In order to celebrate their entry into the world of films, they threw a party in a fashionable Berlin restaurant practically spending their entire earning in lobster, caviar and French wines. After sometime Leopold succeeded at last in breaking into the world of journalism. The United Telegraph press agency started by a Catholic politician in co-operation with the United Press of America took him as a telephonist – to relay the agency’s news stories. He was promoted a journalist after he had made a first-class scoop by snatching an interview with Madame Gorky.      Happy and vaguely alienated, one day in the spring of 1922, the young journalist received a letter that was to change the course of the following 70 years of his life. Uncle Dorian, his mother’s youngest brother had invited him to Jerusalem, to live in his delightful old Arab stone house. Dorian headed a mental hospital in Jerusalem. He was not a Zionist himself… nor, for that matter attracted to the Arabs.      Like the average European, Asad had come to the Middle East with ‘some romantic and erroneous notions’ about Arabs. He had never thought of Palestine as an Arab land, thought it did not take him long to realize that the Jews were not coming to it as one returns to one’s homeland; they were rather bent on making it into a homeland conceived on European patterns and Europeans aims. He asked Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist movement and the future president of Israel: How can you ever hope to make Palestine your homeland in the face of the vehement opposition of the Arabs who, after all, are in the majority in this country? ‘We accept that they won’t be in a majority after a few years’, Weizmann ‘answered dryly’.      But neither Dorian nor Jerusalem could stop Leopold from his wanderings. He became a correspondent for Frankfurter Zeitung. 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 people.      End of 1923 saw him back in Vienna, reconciling with his father and reporting to his editor-in-chief Dr Heinrich Simon. Leopold Weiss had established himself as a writer on Arab and Middle Eastern affair and Frankfurter Zeitung was now willing to remunerate him properly and keen that he returned to the area as soon as he had finished the book he had contracted to write.      He finished the book, Unromantisches Morgenland, and in Spring 1924, he was off again to the Middle East. The book did not sell well. It saw the Middle East in its day-by-day realities, and not as an exotic or romantic Orient. It was also ‘anti-Zionist’. However, crossing the Mediterranean, Leopold’s first stop was at Cairo where he tried to learn Arabic and spend some time with Shaikh Mustafa Maraghi. He wanted to gain a fuller picture of Islam. Mustafa Maraghi subsequently became the Shaikh of Al-Azhar. Early summer 1924, the special correspondent was on the move again. To Amman, to Damascus, Tripoli and Aleppo, to Baghdad and to the Kurdish mountains, to that strangest of all lands, Iran, and to the wild mountains and steppes of Afghanistan.      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 God and Muhammad is His Prophet" and become a Muslim in fact, as you already are in your heart’, said the horseshoe-smith. ‘I will go with you tomorrow to Kabul and take you to the amin, and he will receive you with open arms as one of us’, he asserted.      But Leopold travelled on: from Kabul to Ghazni, Kandahar and Heart. Early 1926, he was homeward bound: via Marv, Samarkand, Bokhara and Lashkent and thence across the Lurkoman steppes to Urals and Moscow. Crossing the Polish frontier he arrived straight in Frankfurt. His next engagement was to deliver a series of lectures at the Academy of Geopolitics in Berlin. He also married Elsa, 41 a widow, whom he had met in Berlin during his previous visit. She had a nine-year old son.     His editor wanted him to write another book. He wanted to return to the Muslim world. Leopold felt that he was being driven to Islam. He was surprised to discover that the very aspect of Islam which had attracted him in the first instance – the absence of a division of reality into physical and spiritual compartments and the stress on reason as to why faith – appealed so little to intellectuals who otherwise were wont to claim for reason a dominant role in life. Because of Europe’s long, almost exclusive association with Christianity, even the agnostic European had subconsciously learned to look upon all religious experience thought the lens of Christian concepts, and would regard it as ‘valid’ only if it was accompanied by a thrill of numinous awe before things hidden and beyond intellectual comprehension. Islam did not fulfil this requirement: it insisted on a co-ordination of the physical and spiritual aspects of life on a perfectly natural plane.     Some time after September 1926, he sought out a Muslim friend of his, an Indian who was at that time head of the small Muslim community in Berlin, and told him that he wanted to embrace Islam. Elsa followed a few weeks alter. Leopold had become Asad, something which was strongly disapproved by his father and his sister. The relationship resumed in 1935, after his father had at last come to understand and appreciate the reasons for his conversion to Islam.      Having earlier resigned from Frankfurter Zeitung and signed withNeune Zurcher Zeitung of Zurich, the Telegraat of Amsterdam and the Kolnische Zeitung of Kologne, Asad left Europe and Elsa accompanied him. The major part of the following years, 1927-1932, was spent in Arabia with missions in between to Egypt and Cyrenaica (Libya) in support of the Sanusi mujahidin who had been fighting a desperate guerrilla battle against the Italians. For Asad, however, the Arabian years were, home coming of the heart. Early in 1927, he was received by King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud. He was impressed by the King and the King took a great liking for this new Muslim and he would send for him almost daily. Elsa died and Asad, now a little over 32, acquired an Arab wife, an infant son and a library full of books on early Islamic history. But none of these prevented him either from wandering or marrying over and over again.      Asad rode and rode and explored the peninsula from the northern confines of Arabia towards the south until 1932 when the dust of India replaced the desert clear air of Arabia. He had planned to move on, to Eastern Turkestan, China and Indonesia, but the Islamic poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal persuaded him to remain in India to help elucidate the intellectual premises of the future Islamic state. Iqbal had presented the idea of Pakistan only two years earlier in 1930 and it was not before 1940 that Iqbal’s idea was adopted as a political goal by the All India Muslim League. But to Asad, Pakistan was a dream that demanded to be fulfilled.      His first title on an Islamic theme, Islam at the Crossroads, published in 1934, proved to be extremely popular and was translated in several languages. The Crossroads was a plea of Muslims to avoid a blind imitation of Western social forms and values, and to try to preserve instead their Islamic heritage which once upon a time had been responsible for the glorious, many-sided historical phenomenon comprised in the term ‘Muslim civilization’.     The outbreak of war in Europe in 1939 saw Asad interned as an enemy alien in the Punjab hill town of Dalhousie, and thus there is scant record of his work from 1935 till 1945 when he was freed from internment. He then started a periodical, Arafat, which ceased after publishing about ten issues. Pakistan was achieved in 1947 and the Government of Punjab put Asad in charge of newly established Department of Islamic Reconstruction in Lahore. He embarked on translating Bukhari� the famous Hadith collection and revivedArafat. Asad also contributed eloquently to the debate about Pakistan having an Islamic constitution. Two years later he was seconded to the Pakistan Foreign Service and made director of the Middle East Division in the foreign ministry.      Early in 1952, Asad was sent to New York as Pakistan’s minister plenipotentiary to the UN. But problems had begun to develop between Asad and the foreign ministry bureaucracy. Some people were perhaps jealous for their own petty reasons. Some were suspicious because of his religious and adventurous background. Matters, however, came to head when the ministry refused to give him permission to marry Pola Hamida, an American convert to Islam. Asad resigned toward the end of 1952 saying his private life was more important to him and started to write the story of his wanderings and discovery of Islam. The story, The Road of Mecaa (1954), covers the period before he had left Arabia for India. There are gaps but the story is fascinating and the style inimitable. Asad had promised to narrate, perhaps at other time, the story of the years ‘spent working for and in Pakistan’. It did not appear in his life-time, but, it is reported, he had been working on the remaining part of his story.      Muhammad Asad had quit diplomacy but his intellectual exertions did not come to and end. Encouraged by Pola Hamida, supported morally and materially by the secretary general of the Muslim World League, the late Shaikh Muhammad Sarur as-Sabban and the Shaya family of Kuwait, he embarked on rendering the Qur’aninto English. The first volume of Asad’s English rendering, fromAl-Baqarah to Al-Tawbah, The Message of the Qur’anappeared in 1964. By far the most elegant and lucid of the English translations, Asad’s rendering would have had normal reception from critical to laudatory, but what made it draw a little different attention was its sponsorship by the Muslim World League.      The league had lent its name as a sponsor and had bought several thousand copies for distribution all over the world. Members of the League’s Constituent Council, which included some very distinguished and independent Islamic scholars from the Muslim world, came to know of it only when they presented their own copies. They assumed that the League had satisfied itself that the rendering was faithful and its explanations within the range of general consensus since it had been sponsored by a responsible Islamic body and, therefore, could not be seen as the work of an individual. ‘No they had not’, explained the secretary general. A committee of scholars appointed to review the work found it was too controversial to be distributed on behalf of the Muslim World League.      Asad had been greatly influenced by the liberal apologetics of the late 19th and early 20th century Muslim scholars, specially Shaikh Muhammad Abduhu and his disciple, Rashid Rida, who sought to find a version that they thought would be more easily acceptable to the so called western mind. Asad was not just rendering the accepted meaning of the Qur’an into a really idiomatic English, he was, in his view, trying ‘to reproduce, as closely as possible, the sense which it had for the people who were as yet unburdened with the conceptual images of later Islamic developments’. The previous renderings, he thought, suffered in many cases from what he termed ‘institutionalization’ of Islam ‘into a definite set of laws, tenets and practices’.      ‘The Qur’an cannot be correctly understood’, he wrote, ‘if we read it merely in the light of later ideological developments, losing sight of its original purport and meaning’. That in fact was the whole stress in the vast body of existing Tafsirliterature (renderings and explanations of the Qur’an) that took great care to reach and stick to the understanding of the original sources, the Messenger himself (sws), his Companions (rta), and those after them in the natural order of precedence. Such developments do not allow an easy comprehension of, for example, miracles, the historicity of Abraham (sws) passing the test of fire, the nightly journey and ascension of heaven by Muhammad (sws), the recalling of Jesus (sws) alive into Heaven, or even the Heaven (Jannah) itself etc. Asad is not alone in taking such a ‘rationalistic’ view while reading the Qur’an. What he seems to have done is to put together a number of individual ‘rationalizations’ under one cover.      Asad was dismayed but not discouraged. With the support of his other Arab benefactors, he went ahead with his work and in 1980 produced and published the complete edition of The Message of the Qur’an. Finding him in difficulty in distributing his work, the former Saudi oil minister, Shaikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani bought 20,000 copies of the book.      The great strength of Asad’s rendering, however, lies in its elegant and powerful prose, fluent and highly enjoyable. That is also its weakness, if and when, in the course of its long journey, the language happens to take a swing, the enchanted reader is unlikely to discern any gap between words and meaning.     Asad’s last book, This Law of Ours and other Essays, was published in 1987 and he remained intellectually active until the last days of his life. Nor did he give up his taste for travel and migration, moving between East and West, North and South, yet spending a record 19 years in Tangier, Morocco, before moving finally to Mijas in the Andalusian province of Spain.      However as he travelled in time, his ideas and constructions were overtaken by intellectual and political developments in the Muslim world. Asad himself acknowledged the change in 1980 by adding a new author’s note and 12 footnotes to Islam at the Crossroads, published 46 years ago in 1934, because, he thought that some Muslim readers and leaders had failed to grasp the full implications of his call to cultural creativeness. ‘Alas’, he said, ‘the present re-awakening to the true values of the Qur’an and Sunnah but rather a confusion resulting from the readiness of so many Muslims to accept blindly the social forms and thought processes evolved in the medieval Muslim world instead of boldly returning to the ideology apparent in the only true sources of Islam: the Qur’an and the Sunnah’.     The reference to the medieval Muslim world seemed to hark back to the orientalist comparison of Islam’s prime age, the Qarun al-‘ula with their own dark ages. But otherwise the remarks appeared to be too sweeping and too imprecise for, in fact, the present re-awakening was a call for return to the Qur’an andSunnah and that is what the Islamists the world over were accused of seeking as their goal. It seems when Asad called for a return ‘to the ideology apparent in … the Qur’an and Sunnah’, he wanted the whole exercise to be undertaken virtually de novo, away from what he calls ‘institutionalization’ of Islam ‘into a definite set of laws, tenets and practice’. It is doubtful if that course would take one to the Qur’an and Sunnah as explained and exemplified by Muhammad (sws) and understood and practiced by his Companions (rta).     There lay the gap between Asad’s understanding of Islam and the popular Islam of an entirely new generation of young and enthusiastic Muslims owing no apology to the liberals and rationalists of the colonial era. Islam was challenging the rationality of the whole liberal secular construction and was being challenged in turn by the total might and power of its former colonial adversaries.  Leopold Weiss was born on 2 July 1900. Muhammad Asad died on 20 February 1992. He was buried in the Muslim cemetery in Granada, Andalusia. http://www.renaissance.com.pk/maylefor2y2.html