Muhammad Asad

Origins and early life

Muhammad Asad was born Leopold Weiss at Lemberg in Austrian Galicia on 2 July 1900, into a Jewish family of rabbis: his paternal grandfather Benjamin Weiss was an orthodox rabbi at Czernowitz in Bukovina, in a line of rabbis, and his father Akiva Weiss broke with that tradition to become a lawyer in Lwów and then Vienna.

Work and career

Leopold received a complete Jewish religious education — Hebrew, Aramaic, Torah, Mishnah, Gemara — before he was thirteen, and this fiche states plainly what came next, since he made no secret of it himself: in 1926, in Berlin, he converted to Sunni Islam and took the name Muhammad Asad, Asad meaning lion, the Arabic equivalent of his Hebrew name Aryeh and of Leopold. He is included here under the rule of this site that a Jew who left Judaism remains part of its story, and his own account of that passage, The Road to Mecca (1954), is one of the great spiritual autobiographies of the century.

He had gone east in 1922 as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, crossed Arabia, and after his conversion became a confidant of King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud and travelled the peninsula for six years. Interned by the British in India as an enemy alien in 1939, he emerged to support the creation of Pakistan, drafted memoranda on its Islamic constitution, headed its department of Islamic reconstruction, and served as its minister plenipotentiary to the United Nations in 1952.

His translation and commentary of the Quran, The Message of the Qur'an, published in 1980 after seventeen years of work, is the most widely read English rendering by a Muslim of European origin and is notable for its rationalist reading. He also translated Sahih al-Bukhari. He died at Mijas in Spain on 20 February 1992.