It is truly difficult to give a single descriptor for Muhammad Asad (1900-1992). He was a journalist, a writer, a diplomat, a traveller, and the author of an English translation of the Quran. Born Leopold Weiss to a Jewish family in what is today Ukraine, Asad comes from a lineage of rabbis. Although his father had broken with family tradition and studied law instead, Asad did end up studying Hebrew, the Torah, and Jewish law in his youth and attained a degree of mastery in them before breaking off from home to pursue a writing career to the dismay of his father.
A restless soul, Asad used his career in journalism to travel and explore the East in expeditions that exposed him to a world that captivated his being. In his autobiography, Asad takes us on a journey unlike any other. More than a simple recounting of events that led to his conversion to Islam, The Road to Mecca is a theological and spiritual treatise. It can also be considered an anthropological and political commentary, which is particularly informative for those interested in the history of Palestine. During his first visit to Jerusalem in the early 1920s, Asad points out the impact Zionist propaganda had on his perception of Palestine when he was in Europe, and how quickly this was exposed to him once he arrived in Jerusalem. He noted his surprise with the population makeup of the city:
[T]here were the Jews: indigenous Jews, wearing a tarbush and a wide, voluminous cloak, in their facial type strongly resembling the Arabs; Jews from Poland and Russia, who seemed to carry with them so much of the smallness and narrowness of their past lives in Europe that it was surprising to think they claimed to be of the same stock as the proud Jew from Morocco or Tunisia in his white burnus. But although the European Jews were so obviously out of all harmony with the picture that surrounded them, it was they who set the tone of Jewish life and politics and thus seemed to be responsible for the almost visible friction between Jews and Arabs.What did the average European know of the Arabs in those days? Practically nothing. When he came to the Near East he brought with him some romantic and erroneous notions; and if he was well-intentioned and intellectually honest, he had to admit that he had no idea at all about the Arabs. I, too, before I came to Palestine, had never thought of it as an Arab land. I had, of course, vaguely known that ‘some’ Arabs lived there, but I imagined them to be only nomads in desert tents and idyllic oasis dwellers. Because most of what I had read about Palestine in earlier days had been written by Zionists – who naturally had only their own problems in view – I had not realized that the towns also were full of Arabs – that, in fact, in 1922 there lived in Palestine nearly five Arabs to every Jew, and that, therefore, it was an Arab country to a far higher degree than a country of Jews…
From the very beginning I had a feeling that the whole idea of Jewish settlement in Palestine was artificial, and, what was worse, that it threatened to transfer all the complications and insoluble problems of European life into a country which might have remained happier without them. The Jews were not really 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 with European aims. In short, they were strangers within the gates. And so I did not find anything wrong in the Arabs’ determined resistance to the idea of a Jewish homeland in their midst; on the contrary, I immediately realized that it was the Arabs who were being imposed upon and were rightly defending themselves against such an imposition. [92-93]
During his time in Palestine, Asad navigated through its intellectual networks, which revealed to him an ongoing debate in the Jewish community between those who identified as Zionists and their opposition, which at times turned violent:
I now had many friends in Palestine, both Jews and Arabs. The Zionists, it is true, looked upon me with some sort of puzzled suspicion because of the sympathy for the Arabs which was so apparent in my dispatches to the Frankfurter Zeitung. Evidently they could not make up their minds whether I had been ‘bought’ by the Arabs (for in Zionist Palestine people had become accustomed to explain almost every happening in terms of money) or whether I was simply a freakish intellectual in love with the exotic. But not all Jews living in Palestine at that time were Zionists. Some of them had come there not in pursuit of a political aim, but out of a religious longing for the Holy Land and its Biblical associations.
To this group belonged my Dutch friend Jacob de Haan, a small, plump, blond-bearded man in his early forties, who had formerly taught law at one of the leading universities in Holland and was now special correspondent of the Amsterdam Handelsblad and the London Daily Express. A man of deep religious convictions – as ‘orthodox’ as any Jew of Eastern Europe – he did not approve of the idea of Zionism, for he believed that the return of his people to the Promised Land had to await the coming of the Messiah.
‘We Jews,’ he said to me on more than one occasion, ‘were driven away from the Holy Land and scattered all over the world because we had fallen short of the task God had conferred upon us. We had been chosen by Him to preach His Word, but in our stubborn pride we began to believe that He had made us a “chosen nation” for our own sakes – and thus we betrayed Him. Now nothing remains for us but to repent and to cleanse our hearts; and when we become worthy once again to be hearers of His Message, He will send a Massiah to lead His servants back to the Promised Land…’
‘But,’ I asked, ‘does not this Messianic idea underlie the Zionist movement as well? You know that I do not approve of it: but is it not a natural desire of every people to have a national home of its own?’
Dr. de Haan looked at me quizzically: Do you think that history is but a series of accidents? I don’t. It was not without a purpose that God made us lose our land and dispersed us; but the Zionists do not want to admit this to themselves. They suffer from the same spiritual blindness that caused our downfall. The two thousand years of Jewish exile and unhappiness have taught them nothing. Instead of making an attempt to understand the innermost causes of our unhappiness, they now try to circumvent it, as it were, by building a “national home” on foundations provided by Western power politics; and in the process of building a national home, they are committing the crime of depriving another people of its home.’
Jacob de Haan’s political views naturally made him most unpopular with the Zionists (indeed, a short time after I left Palestine, I was shocked to learn that he had been shot down one night by terrorists). When I knew him, his social intercourse was limited to a very few Jews of his own way of thought, some Europeans, and Arabs. For the Arabs he seemed to have a great affection, and they, on their part, thought highly of him and frequently invited him to their houses. As a matter of fact, at that period they were not yet universally prejudiced against Jews as such. It was only subsequent to the Balfour Declaration – that is, after centuries of good-neighbourly relations and a consciousness of racial kinship – that the Arabs had begun to look upon the Jews as political enemies; but even in the changed circumstances of the early Twenties, they still clearly differentiated between Zionists and Jews who were friendly toward them like Dr. de Haan. [98-99]
After his years in Palestine engaging in these debates and observing the practical implications of the Zionist project beyond the carefully tailored narratives being disseminated outside of the region, Asad concluded that this was far from a matter of establishing a Jewish homeland – this was another iteration of a European colonialist project in the Arab world:
Throughout the years I have spent in the Middle East – a sympathetic outsider from 1922 to 1926, and as a Muslim sharing the aims and hopes of the Islamic community ever since – I have witnessed the steady European encroachment on Muslim cultural life and political independence; and wherever Muslim peoples try to defend themselves against this encroachment, European public opinion invariably labels their resistance, with an air of hurt innocence, as ‘xenophobia’.
Europe has long been accustomed to simplify in this crude way all that is happening in the Middle East and to view its current history under the aspect of Western ‘spheres of interest’ alone. While everywhere in the West (outside of Britain) public opinion has shown much sympathy for the Irish struggle for independence or (outside of Russia and Germany) for Poland’s dream of national resurrection, no such sympathy is ever extended to similar aspirations among the Muslims.
I first began to realize this in Palestine, in 1922, when I observed the equivocal role of the British administration with regard to the conflict between the Arabs and the Zionists; and it became fully obvious to me early in 1923, when after months of wandering all over Palestine I came to Egypt, which at that time was in almost continual upheaval against the British ‘protectorate’. Bombs were often thrown at public places frequented by British soldiers, to be answered by various repressive measures – martial law, political arrests, deportations of leaders, prohibitions of newspapers. But none of these measures, however severe, could deaden the people’s desire for freedom. Through the entire Egyptian nation went something like a wave of passionate sobbing. Not in despair: it was rather the sobbing of enthusiasm at having discovered the roots of its own potential strength. [104-105]
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