Ahmad Farouk Musa || 8 January 2025
Asad’s odyssey across the Muslim world
In early summer of 1924, Muhammad Asad was on the move again. He travelled to Amman, to Damascus, Tripoli and Aleppo, to Baghdad and to the Kurdish mountains, then to Iran, and to the wild mountains and steppes of Afghanistan (Abdulfattah, 2024). Travelling extensively throughout the Muslim world, his interest in Islam deepened. As Asad has made Muslim renaissance his main agenda, he took a task in immersing himself in understanding the main source of Islam, the Qur’ān itself. Considering Arabic is a semitic tongue, he embarked on an intensive study of classical Arabic which has remained intact for fourteen centuries, from living with the bedouins of Arabia whose speech and linguistic associations had essentially remained unchanged since the time of Prophet Muhammad. In order to grasp the spirit of the language, he decided that he must be able to feel and to hear the language as the Arabs felt and heard it at the time when the Qur’ān was being revealed. It gave him insight into the semantics of the Qur’ānic language unknown to any Westerner, and enabled him later to translate the Qur’ān into English as The Message of the Qur’ān (Asad, 2013, p. xix). Along with his commentary, The Message is without parallel in conveying the holy book’s meaning and spirit to non-Arab readers in Shakespearean English. It was the best, apart from Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s and Marmaduke Pickthall’s translations which are the most remarkable among the contemporary efforts to convey the message of the Qur’ān in English (Hoffman, 2000, p. 242).
In his study of the Qur’ān, Asad found that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own fatalistic attitude towards life (Rahim, 1995, pp. 45-46). This was most probably from the theological views of some Imams of later years which evolved predominantly as the Ash’āira school of thought. It was not Muslims per se that had made Islam great: it was Islam that had made the Muslims great (Asad, 2011, p. 193; 2019, p. 204). Modern Muslim thinkers and adherents alike should find in the principles of Islam a flexibility which allows them to explain and interpret with the greatest freedom while still keeping the faith intact. But when their faith became such a routine habit and ceased to be a program of life to keep innovating and improving, it led to the ossification of faith and understanding, which in turn resulted in the decline of their civilization that ultimately leads to a vacuous sterility.
We know now that Muslims’ renaissance was Asad’s goal in life. He traveled far and wide, conferred with kings, leaders as well as the common man “between the Libyan Desert and the Pamirs, between the Bosporus and the Arabian Sea,” and began putting his ideas on paper (Faruqui, 2024). Islam at the Crossroads[1], the book that was first published in 1934, still keeps the contemporary reader in awe with its analysis of Muslim regression and its prescription for instilling self-confidence to an Islamic world who were facing the onslaught of Western culture (Hoffman, 2000, p. 238).
Asad continued his travel and managed to get across from the northern confines of Arabia towards the south until in 1932 when the monsoons of India replaced the dry desert sand. Asad befriended Muhammad Iqbal, the spiritual father of the idea of a separate Pakistan, while in India. He was in the Indian continent when Iqbal persuaded him to abandon plans to travel to the East including Indonesia in order “to help establish the intellectual premise of a future Islamic state.” He started his ambitious project of translating Sahih Bukhari into English including writing the commentary once he was in India (Musa, 2024, pp. ix-xx).
At the end of the war, Asad was interned in India by the British since he was considered a citizen of an enemy state after Germany took over Austria in World War II (Hasan, n.d.). His project to translate Sahih Bukhari[2] was stalled and the manuscripts destroyed during the chaos from the partition of Pakistan from India after the war. (Asad, 2013, pp. v-viii). When Pakistan was born in 1947, Asad became the first citizen of Pakistan (Shabbir & Laskowska, n.d.). and was then appointed as its undersecretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs and became its permanent representative to the United Nations in 1952. This was where he met his wife, Pola Hamida, a Polish-American and a Muslim convert whom he married the same year (Kepa, n.d.). It was also here that he began writing his remarkable and celebrated autobiography The Road to Mecca,[3] covering the first half of his life and his travel in the Middle East, including his spiritual journey and later ended with the year 1932 where he left the Middle East for British India (Rubin, 2016, pp. 1-28).
After two years in New York, and after his marriage to Pola Hamida created a ruckus with his wife in Pakistan, the couple traveled extensively after his resignation from his position at the Pakistan Foreign Service (Musa, 2024, pp. xvii-xviii). They initially travelled to Morocco, then to Tangiers, then to Portugal, and finally they resided in Spain. In his book that was initially inspired from the formation of the Islamic state of Pakistan, Principles of State and Government in Islam (Asad, 1980),[4] Asad did not lay down the blueprint for an Islamic state but the religious fundamentals such as the concept of shura or mutual consultation in establishing an Islamic government. Within this framework, Asad showed that an Islamic state had the flexibility to contain features of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law as long as shura is observed, not excluding the likes of American institutions of presidency and the Supreme Court (Asad, 1980, pp. 30-50).
The Message of the Qur’ān
“And be conscious of the Day on which you shall be brought back unto God, whereupon every human being shall be repaid in full for what he has earned, and none shall be wronged.”
[Sura al-Baqara; 2:281] (Asad, 2013, p. 75).
It was probably his last project, after years of labour in translating Sahih Bukhāri, that he embarked on translating his magnum opus The Message of the Qur’ān. The Message in a complete form of thirty juzu’ was published in 1980 but he published the first edition in 1964 by the Islamic Centre of Geneva based in Switzerland (Mykhaylo, n.d.). Coincidently, the Islamic Center of Geneva was established by Sa’id Ramadan, the son-in-law of the Ikhwānul Muslimun’s (Muslim Brotherhood) founder Imam Hassan al-Banna. It is true that Muhammad Asad meant to devote only two years to completing the translation and the commentary but ended up spending seventeen years instead. However, it has been acclaimed as one of the best, if not the best, translations of the Qur’ān into English (Eaton, 2003, pp. i-v). Hasan Charles Le Gai Eaton, the British Muslim intellectual, said that no other translator has come close enough to conveying the meaning of the Qur’ān to those who are not familiar with the Arabic language than Muhammad Asad (Eaton, 2003, p. i).
As we have said earlier on, Muhammad Asad dedicated The Message to “people who think.” Indeed, Asad had clearly pointed out in his explanation of verses 31-33 of surah al-Baqara that by virtue of man’s ability to think conceptually, man is superior in this aspect even to angels.
“And He (God) taught Adam all the names”
[Sura al-Baqara; 2:31] (Asad, 2013, p. 30).
The subsequent verses show that owing to his God-given knowledge of those “names”, man is, in certain respect, superior even to the angels. The “names” are a symbolic expression for the power of defining terms, the power to articulate thinking which is peculiar to the human being and which enables him, in the words of the Qur’ān, to be God’s vicegerent on earth. Hence, there is no virtue in taqlid or blind imitation; and the Qur’ān categorically denounces it in a clear rebuke:
“And never concern thyself with anything of which thou hast no knowledge, verily [thy] hearing and sight and heart -all of them – will be called to account on it [on Judgement Day]”
[Sura al-Isra’; 17:36] (Asad, 2013, p. 507).
Instead, each believer is acquired to “use reason” and their own judgement, pursue knowledge in its widest sense, and gain the ability for discernment on moral and religious issues. As this passage in the Qur’an makes clear, the accountability on the Day of Judgment is individual: we will be asked what we have done, not who we followed blindly. Thus, Muslims should not be following their Shaykh and religious leaders blindly without knowing the dalil or religious reasonings but should instead use their own critical mental faculties.
Muslims were obligated to understand their faith based on the Qur’ān as best as they could. They should use their own faculty or reasoning, understanding the message of the Qur’ān by themselves, before seeking help to empower their understanding. To Muhammad Asad, every Muslim ought to be able to say “The Qur’ān has been revealed for me” (Asad, 2013, pp. xv-xxiii). In translating his Message, Muhammad Asad had made copious references especially in his footnotes to Muhammad Abduh whom he considered a person where every single strand of the modern Islamic movement converges (Asad, 2013, p. xx). This is an important fact to be realized since we will not get a clear understanding of his thought without understanding the influence of Muhammad Abduh on him.
Finally, in 1987, Asad published This Law of Ours and Other Essays,[5] which was basically a collection of articles he had written over the years on Muslim religious and political thought but had not published. He remained intellectually active for the next few years until the last days of his life. He spent the final days of his life in Mijas in the Andalusian province of Spain after spending a record 19 years in Tangier, Morocco. 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 (Musa, 2024, p. xx).
It has been Asad’s dream to see the living body of Islam flourish in the modern world. Although distressed by the sad state of the Muslim world and its inconclusive agenda of Islamic reformation, he remained optimistic that, post-Islamic revolution of Iran, a new generation of Muslims would rise eventually to make his dream a reality. He would, in particular, have invested high hopes on Muslim youth for their idealism and their ability and prowess to think and reason. He wanted to revise his Message but his age and health took a toll upon him. To me, Muhammad Asad was the conscience of thinking Muslims, the kind of reformer we need most when entering the new millennium.
Footnotes
[1] Asad, Muhammad. First published in Delhi and Lahore in 1934. Later reprinted by Dār al-Andalus in 1982. Reprinted by The Other Press, Kuala Lumpur in 2022. Translated into Malay as Islam di Persimpangan Jalan by the Islamic Renaissance Front, Kuala Lumpur in 2016.
[2] Asad, Muhammad. Preface to Sahih Al-Bukhāri: The Early Years of Islam. First published in 1938 by Arafat publication, Lahore. Reprinted in 1981 by Dar al-Andalus, Gibraltar. Reprinted by the Islamic Book Trust in 2013.
[3] Asad, Muhammad. Originally published by Max Reinhardt 1954. Republished by the Islamic Book Trust, Kuala Lumpur in 1996. The Malay translation Jalan ke Mekah was published by the Islamic Renaissance Front in 2019.
[4] Asad, Muhammad. Principles of State and Government in Islam was originally published in 1961 by University of California Press, and a revised edition in 1980 by the Islamic Book Trust.
[5] Asad, Muhammad. This Law of Ours and Other Essays. First published by Dār al-Andalus, Gibraltar in 1987. Republished by The Islamic Book Trust in 1987.
References
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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
