Asad, The Neglected Thinker

Yet, Asad remains a somewhat marginal figure. We still await a major study of Asad in English. Nor do we hear his name when we talk of some of the major Muslim thinkers of the last century. Few are aware of his second biography, Homecoming of the Heart, covering his post-Arabia years from 1932. Indeed, our main source for Asad’s life remains Asad himself, even if this is – slowly - starting to change. In Muslim circles, the neglect is even greater. We struggle to find Muslim PhD students or academics engaging his ideas, or Islamic institutes founded in his name. One hardly, if ever, hears Asad’s name in a Friday khutbah.

Muhammad Asad is a richer, more creative, and far more complex Muslim thinker than is commonly recognized. He has a great deal to teach us today, almost three decades after his death. While the broad contours of Asad’s life are known, there remains much that we still do not know. Much of what we think we know about Asad, meanwhile, does not stand up to scrutiny. But above all, Asad is relevant. Asad’s life and thought raises themes of identity, belonging, reform, and the future of Islam that speak no less to our time than his own.

Let us begin by correcting a common misrepresentation. Where Asad does feature in scholarship, he is widely seen as a bridge or mediator between Islam and the West. Popularly known as ‘Europe’s Gift to Islam’, the entrance square to the United Nations building in Vienna has been named ‘Muhammad Asad Platz’. But the truth is far more complex. Asad framed his conversion to Islam as a revolt against the relativism, consumerism, and confusion of postwar Europe. He soon left Europe, moved to Arabia, and devoted his life to the cause of Muslim renewal and reform. In so doing, he drew on diverse trends of the Islamic intellectual tradition, including the modernist reformism of Muhammad ‘Abduh, the revivalist anti-Sufism of Ibn Taymiyyah and the legal theory of Ibn Hazm. Asad was also a harsh critic of European secularism throughout his career. In an early work, Islam at the Crossroads (1934), Asad warned Muslims on the verge of independence from colonial rule against following Europe’s secular path. He argues in this and later works that secular modernity is an era of crisis and decay; the exclusion of religious truth from the political sphere, he writes, lay at the root of the many crises of the modern world. Social, political, and military conflicts were but a symptom of this deeper turmoil. It should not surprise us, then, that upon moving to British India in the 1930s and with the establishment of Pakistan in 1947, Asad called for the creation of a true Islamic State that implemented the shari‘ah:

Islam does not content itself with merely demanding a certain ‘spiritual attitude’…but insists on the believer’s accepting its own scheme of practical life as well. Within the framework of this scheme, called shari’ah, Islam has its own views on progress, its own definition of social good and its own pattern of social relations…Islam stands and falls with its ability to shape our society.

Asad’s conversion to Islam drew on many prevailing tropes of early Zionist discourse; a yearning for rootedness and community, disenchantment with Europe; the romanticization of the Orient as a site of purity and authenticity. But Asad found his resolution in Islam, not Israel. Such affinity for Zionist themes belies his anti-Zionist politics. His first work, Unromantisches Morgenland (Unromantic Orient, 1924), expresses sympathy for the Arab inhabitants of Palestine and introduces the theme of ‘Zionist colonialism’ decades before it became popular in progressive circles. Nor does Christianity fare better. Asad derides it as a ‘spent force’ content with providing spiritual ‘mood music’ rather than taking an active role in shaping the political sphere. He also foreshadows the later post-colonial critique of Eurocentrism, accusing Europeans of conflating their rejection of Christianity with that of religion as such. In an article from 1947, we read:

Because Christianity was the Occident’s only religious experience for so many centuries, the Occidentals have grown accustomed to identify it with ‘religion’ in general; and their modern, obvious disappointment with Christianity has assumed the colour of disappointment with the religious principle as such. In reality, however, they have become disappointed with the only form of religion they had ever known.

It is hard to square this with the popular image of Asad as an ecumenical bridge between East and West. Asad was, in fact, a Muslim thinker whose conversion to Islam was rooted in no small measure by his rejection of much of the Europe of his day. That the popular image persists is a lesson to Muslims: this is what happens if we neglect our scholars. The meaning of their life, thought and legacy is shaped by others.

Yet Asad’s relations with his fellow Muslims was not straightforward. A sense of distance and disconnect followed Asad throughout his career. He never joined a mass movement or organization like the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamaat Islami that would have further spread his ideas. He was also an independent thinker who drew on diverse trends. His emphasis on the role of reason in Islam, for example, evoked the Mu’tazili theological tradition. But Asad also shared considerable common ground with the Islamists. Both Sayyid Qutb and Abu Ala Mawdudi praised Asad’s acerbic critique of secularism. That Asad offered an insider’s critique, as a European convert, only increased his prestige in Islamist circles of the 1940s and 50s. In true idiosyncratic form, however, what Asad meant by ‘shari‘ah’ was unique. A close reading of Asad’s ideas on Islamic law show him to be a disciple of the Ibn Ḥazm and the Ẓahiri legal school, the hitherto extinct madhhab which has been, since at least the fourteenth century, excluded from Sunni legal consensus:

The reader should not propose that the views propounded by me are an unheard-of innovation in Islamic thought…(T)hey were held by the Prophet’s Companions themselves as well as by their immediate successors and, after them, by some of the greatest scholars of Islam - and particularly by the man who is justly regarded as one of the three or four most brilliant minds which the Muslim world has ever produced: Abu Muhammad ibn Hazm of Cordoba.

Asad was also liberal on social matters and mocked the social conservatism of ‘the mullahs’. In a short work, Principles of State and Governance in Islam (1961), he sketched his vision of a true Islamic state, based on Zahiri principles. The resemblance to a liberal western democracy in terms of universal suffrage, freedom of conscious and gender equality is clear.

The point is that Asad is not easy to place. He defies neat classification and our tendency to sharply categorize and define scholars. Is he liberal or Islamist? Progressive or reactionary? Heretical or mainstream? In Asad we see a commitment to social liberalism alongside strident anti-secularism; Mu’tazili-esque theology alongside Zahiri legal theory. The result is that no school of modern Islamic thought fully claims him as their own. The fault lies not with Asad but with our urge to reduce a rich and complex Islamic tradition to such simplistic binaries. Asad challenges these boundaries, forcing us to question what it means to be ‘liberal’, ‘Islamist’ or indeed any other kind of Muslim thinker.

There are perhaps deeper reasons for the disconnect between Asad and his fellow Muslims. Throughout Islamic history, converts have brought many pre-existing beliefs and practices with them into Islam. No one is a tabula rasa. Asad was the convert who left Europe and found spiritual sustenance in Islam. But it was an Islam that Asad understood on his terms, and it would seem that his conception of ‘religion’, ‘reason’ and ‘reform’ was heavily shaped by his formative influences and upbringing in Europe. Consider his denial of miracle stories in the Qur’an. Such stories, he explains, are parabolic myths that serve a solely didactic purpose; they do not refer to actual historical events. The story of Jesus speaking in the cradle (Q3:46, 19) is a ‘metaphorical allusion to the prophetic wisdom which was to inspire Jesus from a very early age.’ On Jesus creating birds out of clay (Q3:49), Asad draws on his Arabic prowess. The pre-Islamic Arabic word for ‘bird’ (tayr) in poetry also meant ‘fortune’ or ‘destiny’:

Thus, in the parabolic manner so beloved by him, Jesus intimated to the children of Israel that out of humble clay of their lives he would fashion for them the vision of a soaring destiny, and that this vision, brought to life by his God-given inspiration, would became their real destiny by God’s leave and by the strength of their faith.

Asad here reveals an Enlightenment conception of ‘reason’ that aims to harmonise religion and scripture with the empirical sciences - an issue that had so decisively shaped Jewish and Christian discourse in the twentieth century, far more so than it has occupied Muslim thinkers. Indeed, scepticism of miracles goes against much of traditional Muslim piety. As the Ottoman Shaykh al-Islam Muṣṭafa Ṣabri would insist, the Islamic tradition saw miracles as proof of Muhammad’s prophecy. It is thus unsurprising that Asad was controversial in some Muslim circles. The initial sponsor for his Qur’anic translation, the Saudi-based Muslim World League, withdrew its support for the project in 1964 and later banned the work outright in 1974, even before publication. For Asad, this rejection stung. He bitterly complained in a private letter in February 1969:

If you knew on what minor, almost insignificant ground, various of their ‘experts’ objected to some of my interpretations, you would be astounded to know to what depths intellectual activities have fallen among some of our so-called scholars, who are afraid of every bit of fresh air. Apparently, they regard Islam as extremely brittle to use his own mind!

Asad later claimed in an interview in his final years that had Islam been in the 1920s like it was today, he would likely have never converted. Asad promoted a ‘rational Islam’, then, that stood against the beliefs of many of its indigenous followers. In short, an Islam emptied of Muslims. He knew of this disconnect and in a sobering note in The Road to Mecca, he asks:

Why is it that, even after finding my place among the people who believe in the things that I myself have come to believe, I have struck no root?

The answer is that Asad’s conception of Islam, reason and reform can only be fully understood in terms of the intellectual culture that he had ostensibly left behind. It was easy for Asad to leave Europe. It was harder for Europe to leave him.

Asad thus reflects the ‘authenticity deficit’ that continues to plague the Western intellectual. Does he serve or betray the tradition? Is he replenishing and indigenizing the faith in a new western frontier, or rather intellectually colonizing Islam, playing the unwitting role of the ‘white saviour’ who teaches the natives their religion? Had Asad lived a decade or so more, the sense is that he would have ultimately made a far more direct and explicit appeal for Western Muslims to lead the revival of Islam. For this seems the direction in which he was travelling in his later years. It is a nascent theme in Asad’s final major work, his Qur’anic translation and commentary, The Message of the Qur’an.

Written between 1958–1980, this work includes a detailed Introduction, four Appendices and no less than 5,371 footnotes. In his Introduction, Asad speaks of seeking to bring the Qur’an nearer to the hearts and minds of people in the West. He dedicates the work to ‘People who think’ (li-qawmmin yatafakkarun). This is no doubt a sign of his modernist reformism, but Asad is surely aware that such a call to ‘reason’ will appeal to western audience. Asad also makes a series of lexical choices that seem designed to resonate with western readers familiar with the Bible and Christian teachings. He chooses ‘God’ over ‘Allah’, for example, foreshadowing later translators like Abd al-Haleem. He uses the pronouns ‘Thee’, ‘Thy’ and ‘Thou’ and verbs ‘shalt’ or ‘dost’ in a style reminiscent of the King James Bible. Asad translates the terms rasul and nabi not as ‘Prophet’ or ‘Messenger’ but instead ‘Apostle’, a term with strong Biblical overtones. The Quranic term khalīfa, often translated as ‘vicegerent’ or ‘successor’, is translated as ‘one who shall inherit’ the Earth, in a nod to Mathew 5:5. This may indicate Asad’s own background; we see here the residual influence of Asad’s upbringing in Europe. Or it may be a deliberate attempt to present the Qur’an in a way amenable to Westerners. What is perhaps most likely is that it is both.

This would further explain Asad’s take on miracles; he knows miracle stories are being challenged in his age and are unlikely to appeal to a western audience. It would also account for the frequency with which Asad’s invokes Islam’s rejection of key Christian doctrines such as Original Sin and vicarious atonement. Asad brings this into his footnotes at every turn, even when commenting upon Qur’anic verses that seem to have no relation to these doctrines. Consider his take on Q35:18:

And no bearer or burdens shall be made to bear another’s burden, and if one weighted down by his load calls upon [another] to help him carry it, nothing thereof may be carried [by that other], even if it be one’s near kind.

Asad says the first half of the verse is a rejection of the idea of the Original Sin and that the second denies the vicarious atonement. No other English translator, from Yusuf Ali, Pickthall, Arberry to The Study Qur’an, refers to these Christian doctrines. Asad knows these doctrines have lost much of their purchase to westerners. His aim, then, is to demonstrate what he sees as the true rationality, cogency and egalitarianism of Islamic teachings. Implicit in this is the idea that Islam and westerners are the perfect fit for the other. Islam can win over a West that has grown tired of Christianity. Western audiences, meanwhile, are a more fertile soil from which to plant the revival of Islam.

If our reading is correct, it is possible to catch glimpses in Asad’s final work of an argument that has since gained traction; that western Muslims are the hope for the future of the ummah; that only western Muslims possess the freedoms and critical inquiry necessary to bring about a renaissance of Islam. It is a claim that we hear today from the likes of Khaled Abou El Fadl and Murad Hoffman. It would also mean that Asad returned, in some way, to his European roots. The causes that first led him to embrace Islam and leave Europe ultimately brought him back, albeit in a way that Asad could never have imagined and had yet to fully express.

We are currently passing through an important cultural moment in which themes of race and identity are under the spotlight as never before. Notions of ‘systematic racism’ or ‘white privilege’ have moved from academic and activist circles to the mainstream. Asad lived and died long before this. As a prominent and early white convert to Islam, however, his experiences may still contribute to contemporary debates.

On the one hand, Asad was certainly the beneficiary of ‘white privilege’ throughout his career. We cannot fail to notice the ease with which he accessed elite circles wherever he went; Mustafa Maraghi in Egypt, Ibn Saud or Arabia, and Muhammad Iqbal in India. No doubt his intellect played a role. But European converts were a true novelty at the time and Asad used this to great effect. Nor do we see any trace of sheepishness in his works at the privilege he was afforded by Muslims of colour. But on the other hand, a closer look at Asad’s life also strengthens the sense that whiteness somehow invalidates Islam, that white Muslims and converts cannot be ‘truly’ Muslim. In Homecoming of the Heart, Asad speaks of the discrimination he faced while working for the Pakistani government between 1947-51 on account of his not being desi. More troubling are the anti-Semitic tropes that followed Asad throughout his career in the Muslim world. It is little known, for example, that while working on The Road to Mecca in New York in the 1950s, Asad faced a character assassination campaign in the Pakistan press. He had to repeatedly deny claims that he was an Israeli spy or had reverted to Judaism. The following is an extract from a private letter from Asad to then-Pakistani Foreign Minister Zafarullah Khan, dated 6 July 1953:

Dear Chaudhri Sahib,

I am sorry that every time I write to you it is about something unpleasant, but I really see no way out of a difficult situation without placing before you the facts of the libel and slander to which I am now exposed. Since my resignation from the Foreign Service, a spate of malicious rumours, both oral and in the press, has been put into circulation to the effect that:

1) I have forsaken my allegiance to Islam and have reverted to Judaism;

2) I have exerted my influence in the Pakistan Foreign Ministry in favor of the Jews and have been advocating Arab rapprochement to Israel;

3) In the course of my recent tours of the Middle East I have surreptitiously visited Israel;

4) I have married in the United States a Jewess…

We can feel the pain and hurt of Asad as he continues:

The ostensible trigger for this was Asad’s decision to divorce his second Arabian wife for an American Catholic convert to Islam. It is indeed a sad irony that Asad was forced to defend his commitment to Islam at the time of writing a book that sought to explain to a Western audience all what he found beautiful about his faith. Seen from another angle, however, much of this is not unique to Asad. Until today, white Muslims and converts continue to speak of sense of alienation from wider Muslim spaces. Alongside the celebration of (white) converts sits a more sombre reality, one in which they are interrogated upon entering mosques, isolated during religious festivals or even accused of spying on the community. White Muslims remain either fetishized or marginalised, but seldom treated as equal. The career of Muhammad Asad speaks to this reality. It is instructive to think that upon his death in 1992, Asad had been Muslim for 66 of his 92 years. Yet he was, and will always, be seen first and foremost as a convert.

This smear campaign is one of many largely unknown aspects of The Road to Mecca. Published to wide acclaim in 1954, the book purports to tell the story of how Asad left his European-Jewish heritage and embraced Islam, immersing himself between 1926–32 with the Bedouins of central Arabia and becoming a close confident of the Saudi founder, Ibn Saud. Part travelogue and part memoir, it is today considered one of the great spiritual biographies of the twentieth century, rivalled perhaps only by that of Malcolm X.

The work’s iconic status is yet to be fully reflected in critical scholarship. But what we do have is telling. The Road to Mecca can no longer be read as a reliable and historically accurate account of the life of its author. The one major critical study of the text by Gunter Windhager (in German) does much to separate historical fact from narrative fiction; Asad’s Bedouin travelling companion in the opening chapters, Zayd, for example, is shown to be a purely literary figure. Consider, too, the notable omissions in the text. In an early critical review, Judd Teller accused Asad of willfully downplaying the Jewish element of his story:

It is remarkable that he does not discuss European anti-Semitism, as though this had no effect on him. Yet he was born in Galicia, where the Jews were caught up as scapegoats in the power struggles of the anti-Semitic Ukrainians and Poles and the dubiously tolerant Austrian government. He was brought up in Vienna, when it was the capital of European anti-Semitism…Did all this leave him untouched?

Asad also provides no details of any formal study throughout these Arabian years. To this day we do not know what texts he studied, with whom, or what impacted his ideas about the Islamic intellectual tradition – a notable lacuna for someone who will seek to reform that very tradition. Most telling is the failure to disclose the true reasons for his eventual departure from Arabia in 1932. A curt reference to a restlessness of spirit and desire to explore other Muslim lands hardly convinces; one suspects far more has been left unsaid. Asad’s private letters also lead us to question his avowed intention in writing the text. In the Introduction, Asad claims to be motivated by a desire to communicate the beauty of Islam to a western audience. His private letters from the period point to something more mundane: financial hardship and a lucrative contract offer from Simon & Schuster.

Asad is hardly unique in this. No autobiographer can be purely objective in telling their story. And perhaps a focus on historical ‘fact’ blinds us from the deeper ’truths’ that Asad sought to convey. But the task for future scholars is to explore the full extent of Asad’s editorial enterprise. This must include a cross-reading of the four different editions of The Road to Mecca, published between 1954 to 1980. It is too little known that Asad made a series of editorial changes across each edition. Even a cursory comparison of the texts is revealing. Consider the criticism of Ibn Saud in the first 1954 edition of The Road to Mecca.

His (Ibn Saud’s) unprecedented rise to power at a time when most of the Middle East had succumbed to Western penetration filled the Arab world with the hope that here at last was the leader who would lift the entire Arab nation out of its bondage; and many other Muslim groups besides the Arabs looked to him to bring about a revival of the Islamic idea in its fullest sense by establishing a state in which the spirit of the Koran would reign supreme. But these hopes remained unfulfilled. As his power increased and was consolidated, it became evident that Ibn Saud was no more than a king – a king aiming no higher than so many other autocratic Eastern rulers before him.

A good and just man in his personal affairs, loyal to his friends and supporters, generous towards his enemies, graced by intellectual gifts far above the level of most of his followers, Ibn Saud has, nevertheless, not displayed that breadth of vision and inspired leadership which was expected of him. True, he has established a condition of public security in his vast domains unequalled in Arab lands since the time of the early Caliphate a thousand years ago; but, unlike those early Caliphs, he accomplished this by means of harsh laws and punitive measures and not be inculcating in his people a sense of civic responsibility. He has sent a handful of young men abroad to study medicine and wireless telegraphy; but he has done nothing to imbue his people as a whole with a desire for education and thus to lift them out of the ignorance in which they have been steeped for many centuries. He always speaks – with every outward sign of conviction – of the grandeur of the Islamic way of life; but he has done nothing to build up an equitable, progressive society in which that way of life could find its cultural expression.

Now compare this with the exultant praise seen in same passage from the 1973 edition:

His unprecedented rise to power at a time when most of the Middle East had succumbed to Western penetration filled the Arab world with the hope that here at last was the leader who would lift the entire Arab nation out of its bondage; and many other Muslim groups besides the Arabs looked to him to bring about a revival of the Islamic idea in its fullest sense by establishing a state in which the spirit of the Koran would reign supreme.

A good and just man in his personal affairs, loyal to his friends and supporters, generous towards his enemies and implacable towards hypocrites, graced by intellectual gifts far above the level of most of his followers. Ibn Saud has established a condition of public security in his vast domains equally in Arab lands since the time of the early Caliphate a thousand years ago. His personal authority is tremendous, but it does not rest so much on actual power as on the suggestive strength of his character. He is utterly unassuming in words and demeanor. His truly democratic spirit enables him to converse with the beduins who come to him in dirty, tattered garments as if he were one of them.

Perhaps the passing of two decades led Asad by 1973 to reflect more fondly on Ibn Saud. But this seems unlikely. The sense remains that the first edition of 1954 is closest to Asad’s true feelings. This would explain Asad’s departure from Arabia in 1932 after his growing disillusion with the leadership of Ibn Saud. Yet this in turn raises the question;: why the hagiographic shift in 1973? Several scholars point to the controversy around his Qur’anic translation and commentary during this same period; these edits are, perhaps, an attempt to restore Saudi sponsorship of the project. If so, the 1973 edition of The Road to Mecca - the same year as the oil boom - could be read as an early witness to the growing reach and influence of Saudi financial and publishing clout in the modern Muslim world.

These editorial strategies show us that The Road to Mecca is not a static text. It is, rather, a dynamic account of the life of its author, which Asad re-shaped at different times and in light of changing circumstances. An exhaustive comparative study of each edition would surely reveal the full depth and breadth of this strategy. It would also give a rich insight into the many ways in which Asad’s positions changed over the course of his long career.

Why, then, do we still await a comprehensive study of this formidable Muslim thinker in English? Perhaps it is the sheer size of the task. A proper study of Asad requires competency in at least four languages (English, German, Arabic and Urdu). The researcher must tackle an intellectual output that includes seven published works (plus, for Islam at the Crossroads and Road to Mecca, different editions thereof), six edited issues of the journal Islamic Culture (January 1937-1938), ten issues of his journal ‘Arafat (1946-47), numerous radio talks, articles and public speeches, private letters, and interviews with surviving friends and family. Such a study would require extensive research to illuminate the backdrop to various stages of Asad’s life; from early-twentieth century European Jewry to the formative years at the dawn of the Saudi and Pakistani states. Asad’s own account would have to be cross read against competing voices. It is, in short, a daunting task.

Yet there is another facet to consider. The answer may also lie in the intellectual dryness of modern Islam and the failure of Muslims to claim Asad as one of their own. To the modern Muslim’s need for easy answers and quick certainties, for example, Asad only provokes questions. To our tribalized ‘Sufi-or-Salafi’ milieu, Asad defies neat classification. To those who prefer to memorize, Asad calls for critical thinking. The disconnect that followed Asad in his life, then, has continued long after his death. The sense remains that had Asad served Zionism or Christianity like he served Islam, there would be numerous studies venerating his life, thought and contribution. It is perhaps telling that the best scholarship on Asad today is found in the academic field of Jewish Studies. Muslims, meanwhile, scholarly and popular, are largely absent. A formidable intellect of the twentieth century thus converts to Islam and devotes his life to the faith, producing much by way of thought and argument. Upon his death, however, he recedes into the background. There is little effort to preserve, spread, engage, or develop his ideas by the community of which he was a part. Where Asad does feature today, it is an airbrushed version, a ecumenical ‘bridge’ cleansed of much of his actual thought.

The result is that we are left with half-truth, simplification, and ignorance. Asad is neglected and misrepresented in equal measure. If known at all, he is shaped and defined by others. The far more complex and interesting story of who Muhammad Asad was and what he can teach us remains largely unexplored. Whatever we are to make of Asad, a deeper appreciation of his life, thought and legacy is both required and overdue.

(T)he few points which I have quoted above do undermine the reputation which I have built up for myself in the course of my twenty-five years’ work for Islam and the idea of Pakistan. You can well imagine how it hurts to be accused of disloyalty by the community to which one’s whole life has been devoted….