Muhammad Assad Muhammad Assad is an influential voice to Muslim scholars around the world. His life changed when he entered Islam: “After all, it was a matter of love, and love is composed of many things; of our desires and our loneliness, of our high aims and our shortcomings, of our strengths and our weaknesses. So it was my case. Islam came over me like a robber who enters a house by night; unlike a robber, it entered to remain for good.” Early Life On the 12th of July 1900 Leopold Weiss was born to a Jewish family in the town of Lvov which was part of the Austrian Empire and is now in Poland. His paternal grandfather was an Orthodox Rabbi. By the age of 14 he and his family lived in Vienna where his father worked as an attorney. Weiss’ parents were not very religious and only clung to Judaism out of habit, but they insisted that he have religious studies with a tutor. This resulted in him being fluent in Hebrew and Aramaic and completely knowledgeable of all the scriptures and writings of his faith. Had he wanted to, he was ready to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. Even though he didn’t disagree with the moral principles of Judaism, he later spoke of how it bothered him that instead of being the creator and sustainer of mankind, the Hebrew’s God appeared to be a tribal god who was only concerned with the requirements of the “chosen people”. All those hours of study helped him understand the fundamental purpose of religion but actually led him away from Judaism. At the end of the World War I, he decided to study philosophy and the art of history. Even though Vienna was an intellectually and culturally stimulating city at the time, he failed to find satisfaction in his studies or at the cafés, where lively debates on subjects including psychoanalysis, logical positivism, linguistic analysis and semantics took place. First Exposure to Islam Weiss was first exposed to Islam in 1922. After he abandoned his studies at the University of Vienna he was invited by an uncle to visit Jerusalem. The house where he stayed was situated in the old city, near the Jaffa Gate. As he watched the Arabs he fantasized that any one of them could have been one of the young warriors who had accompanied David from his flight from the jealousy of Saul. He was also struck by how Islam infused the daily lives of the Arabs with inner peace, gave their existence meaning and filled them with spiritual strength. The Dutch poet and journalist Israël de Haan and Weiss became friends and, through him, Weiss found work writing small articles for the Frankfurter Zeitung. He travelled for two years all over the Middle East and Central Asia. During these travels he met many heads of state and mingled with ordinary people. He came into contact with Islam and experienced different aspects of it. He concluded that when properly interpreted, Islam could lead the Muslims forward providing the spiritual sustenance that neither Judaism nor Christianity could. Conversion to Islam Upon his return to Europe, he settled in Frankfurt and 23
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