Ahmad Farouk Musa || 2 Januari 2025

Abstract

This paper focuses on one of the most famous modern Muslim scholars: Muhammad Asad. He was born as a Jew by the name of Leopold Weiss in the year 1900. In his life’s works, Asad drew his methodology from the medieval Spanish scholar Ibn Hazm whom he called Imāmul A’zam (the greatest Imam). His translation and exegesis of the Qur’an in English—The Message of the Qur’an—drew its inspiration from Muhammad Abduh’s tafsir Al-Manar, where he attempted to fuse ‘aql (reason) and naql (texts). Muhammad Asad struggled for the renaissance of Islam and the rejuvenation of Islamic spirit. Through his extensive journey throughout the Muslim world, he made acquaintances with renowned Muslim scholars including Shaikh Mustafa al-Marāghi, who would later become the Mufti of al-Azhar, Omar al-Mukhtar, the symbol of resistance in the Muslim world, and Muhammad Iqbal, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. This paper will briefly look into his Qur’ānic exegesis The Message of the Qur’ān. His thoughts and ideas might have evolved later in his life since he lived a full 92 years, but his ideas as seen in The Message was ahead of his time and showed how he appreciated the ideas of Islamic reform that was promoted by Muhammad Abduh and Jamaluddin al-Afghāni before him. Indeed, the first and most important idea of Muhammad Asad’s vision was his conviction that Islam is based on reason and, consequently, argumentation is necessary to becoming and being a Muslim.

Keywords: Muhammad Asad, reason, reform, renaissance, The Message of the Qur’ān

Introduction

Muhammad Asad (1900-1992) is arguably one of the greatest Muslim intellectuals who ever lived, but remains almost unknown in the West and relatively unknown to the average Muslim (Hoffman, 2000, pp.233-237). However, those who have followed his work through his books and writings know that no one has contributed more in our times to the understanding of Islam and the awakening of Muslims, or perhaps worked harder to build a bridge between the East and the West, than Muhammad Asad (Asad T., 2011, pp.155-165).

Muhammad Asad was born Leopold Weiss on 2 July, 1900 in Lviv, Galicia, then part of the greater Austrian empire, but now in Ukraine. At the age of 26, he converted to Islam and became Muhammad Asad. Before his conversion, his spiritual journey was basically in search of a home, where he was unable to quell his restless spirit until he embraces Islam. How he transformed into this new spiritual life is best described in his own words:

“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 in my case. Islam came over like a thief at night; but unlike a thief, it entered to remain for good”

(Nawwab, 2002).

Asad’s journey into Islam

It was in an underground Berlin train that Weiss experienced his first epiphany. In September 1926, he was travelling with his wife Elsa, when he saw that people around him in the train had no smiles on their faces, as if they are in agony, despite their opulent dress. Back to his flat after that incident, he noticed a surah of the Qur’ān he was reading earlier on: At-Takāthur (the Abundance of Wealth):

1. YOU ARE OBSESSED by greed for more and more
2. until you go down to your graves.
3. Nay, in time you will come to understand!
4. And once again: Nay, in time you will come to understand!
5. Nay, if you could but understand [it] with an understanding [born] of certainty,
6. you would indeed, most surely, behold the blazing fire [of hell]!
7. In the end you will indeed, most surely, behold it with the eye of certainty:
8. and on that Day you will most surely be called to account for [what you did with] the boon of life!
9. (Asad, 2013, p. 1161)

Weiss said that the Qur’ān literally shook in his hands, and he was speechless. He documented the experience: “It was an answer: an answer so decisive that all doubt was suddenly at an end. I knew now, beyond any doubt, that it was a God-inspired book I was holding in my hand” (Wilmot, 2024, pp. xxi-xxxix).  Asad then made his way to an Indian Muslim friend living in Berlin and proclaimed the shahāda immediately. A few weeks later, his wife Elsa followed suit.  Upon conversion, he took the names Muhammad in honour of the Prophet, and Asad (meaning “lion”) as a reminder of his given name, Leopold.

In 1922, before embracing Islam, Asad was a foreign correspondent in the Near and Far East for the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the most outstanding newspapers in Europe at that time. His career in journalism took him to many parts of the Islamic world including Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Persia, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan, and made him understand the socio-political issues at that time including those related to Jews and Arabs especially (Iqbal, 2016).  He became very critical of the Zionist agenda then, and remained steadfast to be an anti-Zionist throughout his entire life (Maarif, 2024, pp. xxi-xxvii). He subsequently crossed the Mediterranean with his first stop at Cairo, where he learnt Arabic and spent some time with Shaikh Mustafa al-Marāghi, a student of the great Egyptian reformer Imam Muhammad Abduh. This was the same Mustafa Marāghi, a critical thinker himself, who subsequently became the Sheikh of al-Azhar (Musa & Koya, 2009).[1]

Asad’s strong rebuke against taqlid (blind imitation)

It was through his friendship with al Marāghi that he realized that al-Azhar had lapsed into sterility, a condition that afflicted the whole Muslim world as well, with no new ideas and innovations. Those former Islamic thinkers would never have dreamt that their ideas would remain fossilized for a few centuries, and repeated over and over again, as if they were sacred and infallible truths (Asad, 1996, pp. 188-193; 2019, pp. 199-204).

Muhammad Asad realized at that time that just as some saints and scholars would be surprised to see their graves made into shrines, many will also be shocked to see how their words were immortalized.  This was the essence of the concept of taqlid, or blind imitation—a concept that made Muslims backward and unproductive, whereby men clung blindly to the beliefs of their forefathers; a concept that Muhammad Abduh and other reformers waged war against.

“And [so,] whenever they commit a shameful deed, they are wont to say, “We found our forefathers doing it,” and, “God has enjoined it upon us.” Say: “Behold, never does God enjoin deeds of abomination. Would you attribute unto God something of which you have no knowledge?” [Sura al-A’raf; 7:28]
(Asad, 2013, p. 247).

The blind acceptance of scholars’ opinions, upholding books as al-Bukhāri, Muslim, at-Tirmizi and others as if they were complete truths, has created an interpretation of Islam that doesn’t allow progress and reform. The blind following of scholars such as Imam Shāfie and others of the past, who were only Muslim intellectuals of the first few centuries, has created a version of Islam that does not liberate and develop humanity. The scholars of those times lived under monarchical rules, and were invariably influenced by the rampant culture of collusion between the rulers and the ulama’ or scholars. The passiveness and downfall of the Muslims as cited from the work of many academics comes from the blind imitation or taqlid and false assumptions we have on the early Islamic scholars and their works (Kuru, 2024, pp. 78-81, 136-148). It was quoted that a renowned scholar among the Sunnis, Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazāli, who lived in the 11^th century, consistently defended the idea of the religion-state collusion. He even wrote in his book al-Iqtisad fi al-I’tiqad (Moderation in Belief): “[I]t has been said that religion and sultan are twins, and also that religion is a foundation and the sultan is a guard: that which has no foundation collapses and that which has no guard is lost” (Kuru, 2024, p. 148).

Asad believes that the alien-layer that has covered Islam must be removed before the scholars can wake up from their endless repetition, and before the Muslim world wakes up from its dormancy. All the ahādith (sing. hādith) and traditions were collected by historians, who left us history they thought were reliable, or through the supervision of the elite culture, were concocted or allowed to be incorporated into the Muslim mind. This does not mean that Asad was against hadīth and sunna. In fact, the second book he wrote after Road to Mecca was a translation and commentary of Sahih al-Bukhāri into English titled The Early Years of Islam, published in Lahore in 1938.[2]

So, according to Muhammad Asad, we must approach these books anew as man-recorded history, and thus accept that history and interpretation by scholars to contain forgeries and wrong assumptions. There was a possibility that alien sources and beliefs had entered the minds of the scholars, and tried to infect Islam by making people believe our Prophet said or did certain things. All of the Prophet’s deeds and behaviour were a result of the Qur’ān. Not of any revelation next to it. Therefore, to follow the Prophet, we must follow the Qur’ān and start with the Qur’ān. A similar view was uttered by the martyr Sayyid Qutb in his Ma’ālim fi-at Tarīq or Milestones – which is considered a textbook by the Islamic activists – in the first chapter Al-Jīl al-Qur’ān al-Farīd or The Unique Qur’ānic Generation (Qutb, 2006, pp. 29-36). To use history as guidance is dangerous and misleading in many cases. It is time to be honest, time to admit many mistakes and lies have entered into the idea of what Islam is and tells us. The Qur’ān is Islam; everything else is human interpretation, explication, and recording of history.

Asad’s formulation of an Islamic government

Asad believes that history can only give advice, show the underlying factors when a society was successful, but is not to be replicated to decide the ruling of today’s states and societies. His book The Principles of State and Government in Islam initially published in 1961,[3] a small book of only 107 pages, has become an essential foundation for further efforts to rejuvenate Islamic jurisprudence and to develop a much-needed Islamic political theory of statehood. Admittedly, the initial research for this book was prompted by the need to develop an Islamic constitution for the new Islamic Republic of Pakistan. It was meant to base the society not on the basis of race or nationality but solely on the “ideology” of the Qur’ān and the sunna of the Prophet. But then Asad was also aware that Islamic history could not provide models that could be copied directly. The Constitution of Medina was set up under very peculiar circumstances; it was also unique insofar as it was being ruled by a Messenger of Allāh. In the words of the current Islamic scholar Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, the experience of combining religious and political authority is unique to the Prophet and cannot be replicated (An-Naim, 2008, p. 53). Islamic history has ever since been characterized by despotism. The ideas al-Mawardi (d. 450/1058) in his oft-quoted book by the Islamic ideologues in this country, al-Ahkām as-Sultāniyya, could not serve as the blueprint of an Islamic community in our industrial age (Hoffman, 2000, p. 240).

Asad therefore had to partake in ijtihād in order to make a clear distinction between the relatively small set of divine norms found in the Qur’ān and the sunna in governing state and government which falls under the jurisdiction of as-siyāsi—that is, the political, profane, and relative—where it was essentially man-made notwithstanding the fact that its ultimate sources are rooted in revelation. This was similar to the idea of faraghāt or spaces as articulated by Rachid Ghannouchi, the political leader of an-Nahda of Tunisia (Tamimi, 2001, pp. 182-199; 2018, pp. 301-330.). Ghannouchi, similar like Asad earlier on, contends that if Islam is the final divine revelation to humanity, it is only appropriate that no fixed prescriptions are given for matters that are of changing nature. Thanks to the existence of faraghāt, Muslims can exercise their ijtihād to devise suitable solutions for emerging problems, which makes it fit for all times and places. He strongly asserted that it would be rather naïve to think that all is required for khilāfa to be reinstated would be for Muslim leaders especially just to execute a set of ahkām (rules) in the name of God’s law. Where is the role for ijtihād, or for ‘aql (reason) if Islam is conceived of as encompassing, or catering for, all requirements? This view was expressed at the time when Muhammad Asad has left the world despite articulating this idea much earlier in his Message and his book.

Hence, we need new interpretation that requires new ijtihād. Every generation faces different circumstances, and thus many laws and ways for society cannot be fixed for all time. Laws of Islam in ethics, rights and restrictions, are universal in their application. It is a constitution containing the basis for mankind’s dealing with life. Everything else is time bound and must be reinterpreted by every generation to fit it to their circumstances. This is the true understanding of the sunna, custom of the Prophet, a constant improvement and development of society. A clear understanding of Ghannouchi’s faraghāt theory begins with the assumption that the Prophet did not leave his companions with a set of rules as to how to choose his successor. Ijtihād is mandatory upon them in order to find their own ways and means. Ghannouchi considers this not as a weakness, but instead one of the miracles of Islam (Tamimi, 2001, p. 188; 2018, p. 301). He argues that if Islam is the final divine revelation to humanity, then there should not fixed laws due to the changing nature of human conditions. From this murūna (flexibility), and the existence of spaces or faraghāt, Muslims are free to exercise their ijtihād to search for suitable solutions for new emerging problems. Only then can Islam be suitable for all times and places (Tamimi, 2001, p. 192; 2018. p. 318). As Muhammad Asad translated the first verse from sura al-Furqān:

“HALLOWED is He who from on high, step by step, has bestowed upon His servant the standard by which to discern the true from the false, so that to all the world it might be a warning.”

[Sura al-Furqān; 25:1] (Asad, 2013, p. 655).

Endnotes

[1] Musa, Ahmad Farouk & Koya, Abdul Rahman. Remembering Muhammad Asad, the West’s gift to Islam. In the blurb for the movie screening “A Road to Mecca” on 13^th December 2009, Securities Commission, Mont Kiara, Kuala Lumpur

[2] Arafat publication, later reprinted in Gibraltar: Dār al-Andalus in 1981. The Islamic Book Trust of Kuala Lumpur reprinted the book Sahih al-Bukhāri: The Early Years of Islam in 2013.

[3] University of California Press 1961; reprinted in Gibraltar: Dār al-Andalus 1980. The Islamic Book Trust of Kuala Lumpur reprinted in 2007.

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Dato’ Dr Ahmad Farouk Musa is an academic and researcher at the Jeffrey Cheah School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. He has a PhD in Surgery from Monash University Australia and Masters of Medicine in Surgery from Universiti Sains Malaysia. He is also a Founder and Director at the Islamic Renaissance Front, Kuala Lumpur, a think tank focusing on islah (reform) and tajdid (renewal) in Islam. This essay was initially published by a SCOPUS-Indexed Intellectual Discourse at: https://doi.org/10.31436/id.v32i2