Muhammad Asad's journey to Islam

I WAS ON MY WAY from Herat to Kabul and was riding, accompanied by Ibrahim and an Afghan trooper, through the snow buried mountain valleys and passes of the Hindu-Kush, in central Afghanistan. It was cold and the snow was glistening and on all sides stood steep mountains in black and white.

I was sad and, at the same time, strangely happy that day. I was sad because the people with whom I had been living during the past few months seemed to be separated by opaque veils from the light and the strength and the growth which their faith could have given them; and I was happy because the light and the strength and the growth of that faith stood as near before my eyes as the black and white mountains- almost to be touched with the hand.

My horse began to limp and something clinked at its hoof: an iron shoe had become loose and was hanging only by two nails.

'Is there a village nearby where we could find a smith?' I asked our Afghan companion.

'The village of Deh-Zangi is less than a league away. There is a blacksmith there and the hakim of the Hazarajat has his castle there.'

And so to Deh-Zangi we rode over glistening snow, slowly, so as not to tire my horse.

The hakim, or district governor, was a young man of short stature and gay countenance - a friendly man who was glad to have a foreign guest in the loneliness of his modest castle. Though a close relative of King Amanullah, he was one of the most unassuming men I had met or was ever to meet in Afghanistan. He forced me to stay with him for two days.

In the evening of the second day we sat down as usual to an opulent dinner, and afterward a man from the village entertained us with ballads sung to the accompaniment of a three-stringed lute. He sang in Pashtu- a language which I did not understand - but some of the Persian words he used sprang up vividly against the background of the warm, carpeted room and the cold gleam of snow that came through the windows. He sang, I remember, of David's fight with Goliath - of the fight of faith against brute power - and although I could not quite follow the words of the song, its theme was clear to me as it began in humility, then rose in a violent ascent of passion to a final, triumphant outcry.

When it ended, the hakim remarked: 'David was small, but his faith was great...'

I could not prevent myself from adding: 'And you are many, but your faith is small.'

My host looked at me with astonishment, and, embarrassed by what I had almost involuntarily said, I rapidly began to explain myself. My explanation took the shape of a torrent of questions:

'How has it come about that you Muslims have lost your self-confidence - that self-confidence which once enabled you to spread your faith, in less than a hundred years, from Arabia westward as far as the Atlantic and eastward deep into China - and now surrender yourselves so easily, so weakly, to the thoughts and customs of the West? Why can't you, whose forefathers illumined the world with science and art a time when Europe lay in deep barbarism and ignorance, summon forth the courage to go back to your own progressive, radiant faith? How is it that Attaturk, that petty masquerader who denies all value to Islam, has become to you Muslims a symbol of "Muslim revival"?'

My host remained speechless. It had started to snow outside. Again I felt that wave of mingled sadness and happiness that I had felt on approaching Deh-Zangi. I sensed the glory that had been and the shame that was enveloping these late sons of a great civilization.

'Tell me - how has it come about that the faith of your Prophet and all its clearness and simplicity has been buried beneath a rubble of sterile speculation and the hair-splitting of your scholastics? How has it happened that your princes and great land-owners revel in wealth and luxury while so many of their Muslim brethren subsist in unspeakable poverty and squalor - although your Prophet taught that No one may call himself a Faithful who eats his fill while his neighbor remains hungry? Can you make me understand why you have brushed woman into the background of your lives - although the women around the Prophet and his Companions took part in so grand a manner in the life of their men? How has it come about that so many of you Muslims are ignorant and so few can even read and write - although your Prophet declared that Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman and that The superiority of the learned man over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars?'

Still my host stared at me without speaking, and I began to think that my outburst had deeply offended him. The man with the lute, not understanding Persian well enough to follow me, looked on in wonderment at the sight of the stranger who spoke with so much passion to the hakim. In the end the latter pulled his wide yellow sheepskin cloak closer about himself, as if feeling cold; then he whispered:

'But - you are a Muslim...'

I laughed, and replied: 'No, I am not a Muslim, but I have come to see so much beauty in Islam that it makes me sometimes angry to watch you people waste it ... Forgive me if I have spoken harshly. I did not speak as an enemy.'

But my host shook his head. 'No, it is as I have said: you are a Muslim, only you don't know it yourself...Why don't you say, now and here, "There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Prophet" and become a Muslim in fact, as you already are in your heart? Say it brother, say it now, and I will go with you tomorrow to Kabul and take you to the amir, and he will receive you with open arms as one of us. He will give you houses and gardens and cattle, and we all will love you. Say it, my brother...'

"If I ever do say it, it will be because my mind has been set at rest and not for the sake of the amir's houses and gardens.'

'But,' he insisted, 'you already know far more about Islam than most of us; what is it that you have not yet understood?'

'It is not a question of understanding. It is rather a question of being convinced: convinced that the Koran is really the word of God and not merely the brilliant creation of a great human mind...'

But the words of my Afghan friend never really left me in the months that followed.

From Kabul I rode for weeks through southern Afghanistan - through the ancient city of Ghazni, from which nearly a thousand years ago the great Mahmud set out on his conquest of India; through exotic Kandahar, where you could see the fiercest warrior-tribesmen in all the world; across the deserts of Afghanistan's southwestern corner; and back to Herat, where my Afghan trek had started.

It was in 1926, toward the winter, that I left Herat on the first stage of my long homeward journey, which was to take me by train from the Afghan border to Marv in Russian Turkestan, to Samarkand, Bokhara and Tashkent, and thence across the Turkoman steppes to the Urals and Moscow.

My first (and most lasting) impression of Soviet Russia - at the railway station of Marv - was a huge, beautifully executed poster which depicted a young proletarian in blue overalls booting a ridiculous, white-bearded gentleman, clad in flowing robes, out of a cloud-filled sky. The Russian legend beneath the poster read: 'Thus have the workers of the Soviet Union kicked God out of his heaven! Issued by the Bezbozhniki (Godless) Association of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.'

Such officially sanctioned antireligious propaganda obtruded itself everywhere one went: in public buildings, in the streets and preferably, in the vicinity of houses of worship. In Turkestan these were, naturally, for the most part mosques. While prayer congregations were not explicitly forbidden, the authorities did everything to deter people from attending them. I was often told, especially in Bokhara and Tashkent, that police spies would take down the name of every person who entered a mosque; copies of the Koran were being impounded and destroyed; and a favourite pastime of the young bezbozhniki was to throw heads of pigs into mosques; a truly charming custom.

It was with a feeling of relief that I crossed the Polish frontier after weeks of journeying through Asiatic and European Russia. I went straight to Frankfurt and made my appearance in the now familiar precincts of my newspaper. It did not take me long to find out that during my absence my name had become famous and that I was now considered one of the most outstanding foreign correspondents of Central Europe. Some of my articles - especially those dealing with the intricate religious psychology of the Iranians - had come to the attention of prominent orientalist scholars and received a more than passing recognition. On the strength of this achievement, I was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the Academy of Geopolitics in Berlin - where I was told that has never happened before that a man of my age (I was not yet twenty-six) had been accorded such a distinction. Other articles of more general interest had been reproduced, with the permission of the Frankfurter Zeitung, by many other newspapers; one article, I learned, had been reprinted nearly thirty times. All in all, my Iranian wanderings had been extremely fruitful...


. . . . . . . . .

IT WAS AT THIS TIME that I married Elsa. The two years I had been away from Europe had not weakened our love but rather strengthened it, and it was with a happiness I had never felt before that I brushed aside her apprehensions about the great difference in our ages.

'But how can you marry me?' she argued. 'You are not yet twenty-six, and I am over forty. Think of it: when you will be thirty, I will be forty-five; and when you will be forty, I will be an old woman...'

I laughed: 'What does it matter? I cannot imagine a future without you.'

And finally she gave in.

I did not exaggerate when I said that I could not imagine a future without Elsa. Her beauty and her instinctive grace made her so utterly attractive to me that I could not even look at any other woman; and her sensitive understanding of what I wanted of life illumined my own hopes and desires and made them more concrete, more graspable than my own thinking could ever have done.

On one occasion - it must have been about a week after we had been married - she remarked: 'How strange that you, of all people, should depreciate mysticism in religion...You are a mystic yourself - a sensuous kind of mystic, reaching out with your fingertips toward the life around you, seeing an intricate, mystical pattern in everyday things - in many things that to other people appear so commonplace...But the moment you turn to religion, you are all brain. With most people it would be the other way around...'

But Elsa was not really puzzled. She knew what I was searching for when I spoke to her of Islam; and although she may not have felt the same urgency as I did, her love made her share my quest.

Often we would read the Koran together and discuss its ideas; and Elsa, like myself, became more and more impressed by the inner cohesion between its moral teaching and its practical guidance. According to the Koran, God did not call for blind subservience on the part of man but rather appealed to his intellect; He did not stand apart from man's destiny but was nearer to you than the vein in your neck; He did not draw any dividing line between faith and social behavior; and, what was perhaps most important, He did not start from the axiom that all life was burdened with a conflict between matter and spirit and that the way toward the Light demanded a freeing of the soul from the shackles of the flesh. Every form of life-denial and self-mortification had been condemned by the Prophet in sayings like Behold, asceticism is not for us, and there is no world-renunciation in Islam. The human will to live was not only recognized as a positive, fruitful instinct but was endowed with the sanctity of an ethical postulate as well. Man was taught, in effect: You not only may utilize your life to the full, but you are obliged to do so.

An integrated image of Islam was now emerging with a finality, a decisiveness that sometimes astounded me. It was taking shape by a process that could almost be described as a kind of mental osmosis - that is, without any conscious effort on my part to piece together and 'systematize' the many fragments of knowledge that had come my way during the past four years. I saw before me something like a perfect work of architecture, with all its elements harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other, with nothing superfluous and nothing lacking - a balance and composure which gave one the feeling that everything in the outlook and postulates of Islam was 'in its proper place'.

Thirteen centuries ago a man had stood up and said: 'I am only a mortal man; but He who has created the universe has bidden me to bear His message to you. In order that you might live in harmony with the plan of His creation, He has commanded me to remind you of His existence, omnipotence and omniscience, and to place before you a programmed of behavior. If you accept this reminder and this programmed, follow me.' This was the essence of Muhammad's prophetic mission.

The social scheme he propounded was of that simplicity which goes together only with real grandeur. It started from the premise that men are biological beings with biological needs and are so conditioned by their Creator that they must live in groups in order to satisfy the full range of their physical, moral and intellectual requirements: in short, they are dependent on one another. The continuity of an individual's rise in spiritual stature (the fundamental objective of every religion) depends on whether he is helped, encouraged and protected by the people around him. This human interdependence was the reason why in Islam religion could not be separated from economics and politics. To arrange practical human relations in such a way that every individual might find as few obstacles and as much encouragement as possible in the development of his personality: this, and nothing else, appeared to be the Islamic concept of the true function of society. And so it was only natural that the system which the Prophet Muhammad enunciated in the twenty-three years of his ministry related not only to matters spiritual but provided a framework for all individual and social activity as well. It held out the concept not only of individual righteousness but also for the equitable society which such righteousness should bring about. It provided the outline of a political community - the outline only, because the details of man's political needs are time-bound and therefore variable - as well as a scheme of individual rights and social duties in which the fact of historical evolution was duly anticipated. The Islamic code embraced life in all its aspects, moral and physical, individual and communal; problems of the flesh and of the mind, of sex and economics, side by side with problems of theology and worship, their legitimate place in the Prophet's teachings, and nothing that pertained to life seemed too trivial to be drawn into the orbit of religious thought - not even such 'mundane' issues as commerce, inheritance, property rights of ownership of land.

All the clauses of Islamic Law were devised for the equal benefit of all members of the community, without distinction of birth, race, sex or previous social allegiance. No special benefits were reserved for the community's founder of his descendants. High and low were, in a social sense, nonexistent terms; and nonexistent was the concept of class. All rights, duties and opportunities applied equally to all who professed faith in Islam. No priest was required to mediate between man and God, for He knows what lies open in their hands before them and what they conceal behind their backs. No loyalty was recognized beyond the loyalty to god and His Prophet, to one's parents, and to the community that had as its goal the establishment of God's kingdom on earth; and this precluded that kind of loyalty which says, 'right or wrong, my country' or 'my nation'. To elucidate this principle, the Prophet very pointedly said on more than one occasion: He is not of us who proclaims the cause of tribal partisanship; and he is not of us who fights in the cause of tribal partisanship; and he is not of us who dies for the sake of tribal partisanship.

Before Islam, all political organizations - even those on a theocratic or semi-theocratic basis - had been limited by the narrow concepts of tribe and tribal homogeneity. Thus, the god-kings of ancient Egypt had no thought beyond the horizon of the Nile valley and its inhabitants, and in the early theocratic state of the Hebrews, when God was supposed to rule, it was necessarily the God of the children of Israel. In the structure of Koranic thought, on the other hand, considerations of descent of tribal adherence had no place. Islam postulated a self-contained political community which cut across the conventional divisions of tribe and race. In this respect, Islam and Christianity might be said to have had the same aim: both advocated an international community of people united by their adherence to a common ideal; but whereas Christianity had contended itself with a mere moral advocacy of this principle and, by advising its followers to give Caesar his due, had restricted its universal appeal to the spiritual sphere, Islam unfolded before the world the vision of a political organization in which God-consciousness would be the sole basis of all social institutions. Thus - fulfilling what Christianity had left unfulfilled - Islam inaugurated a new chapter in the development of man: the first instance of an open, ideological society in contrast with the closed, racially or geographically limited, societies of the past.

The message of Islam envisaged and brought to life a civilization in which there was no room for nationalism, no 'vested interests', no class divisions, no Church, no priesthood, no hereditary nobility; in fact, no hereditary functions at all. The aim was to establish a theocracy with regard to God and a democracy between man and man. The most important feature of that new civilization - a feature which set it entirely apart from all other movements in human history - was the fact that it had been conceived in terms of, and arose from, a voluntary agreement of the people concerned. Here, social progress was not, as in all other communities and civilizations known to history, a result of pressure and counterpressure of conflicting interests, but part and parcel of an original 'constitution'. In other words, a genuine social contract lay at the root of things: not as a figure of speech formulated by later generations of power-holders in defence of their privileges, but as the real, historic source of Islamic civilization. The Koran said: Behold, God has bought of the Faithful their persons and their possessions, offering them Paradise in return...Rejoice, then, in the bargain you have made, for this is the triumph supreme.

I knew that this 'triumph supreme' - the one instance of a real social contract recorded by history - was realized only during a very short period; or, rather, only during a very short period was a large-scale attempt made to realize it. Less than a century after the Prophet's death, the political form of pristine Islam began to be corrupted and, in the following centuries, the original programme was gradually pushed into the background. Clannish wranglings for power took the place of a free agreement of free men and women; hereditary kingship, as inimical to the political concept of Islam as polytheism is to its theological concept, soon came into being - and with it, dynastic struggles and intrigues, tribal preferences and oppressions, and the usual degradation of religion to the status of a handmaiden of political power: in short, the entire host of 'vested interests' so well known to history. For a time, the great thinkers of Islam tried to keep its true ideology aloft and pure; but those who came after them were of lesser stature and lapsed after two or three centuries into a morass of intellectual convention, ceased to think for themselves and became content to repeat the dead phrases of earlier generations - forgetting that every human opinion is time-bound and fallible and therefore in need of eternal renewal. The original impetus of Islam, so tremendous in its beginnings, sufficed for a while to carry the Muslim commonwealth to great cultural heights - to that splendid vision of scientific, literary and artistic achievement which historians describe as the golden Age of Islam; but within a few more centuries this impetus also died down for want of spiritual nourishment, and Muslim civilization became more and more stagnant and devoid of creative power.


. . . . . . . .

I HAD NO ILLUSIONS as to the present state of affairs in the Muslim world. The four years I had spent in those countries had shown me that while Islam was still alive, perceptible in the world-view of its adherents and in their silent admission of its ethical premises, they themselves were like people paralyzed, unable to translate their beliefs into fruitful action. But what concerned me more than the failure of present-day Muslims to implement the scheme of Islam were the potentialities of that scheme itself. It was sufficient for me to know that for a short time, quite at the beginning of Islamic history, a successful attempt had been made to translate that scheme into practice; and what had seemed possible at one time might perhaps become really possible at another. What did it matter, I told myself, that the Muslims had gone astray from the original teaching and subsided into indolence and ignorance? What did it matter that they did not live up to the ideal placed before them by the Arabian Prophet thirteen centuries ago - if the ideal itself still lay open to all who were willing to listen to its message?

And it might well be, I thought, that we latecomers needed that message even more desperately than did the people of Muhammad's time. They lived in an environment much simpler than ours, and so their problems and difficulties had been much easier of solution. The world in which I was living - the whole of it - was wobbling because of the absence of any agreement as to what is good and evil spiritually and, therefore, socially and economically as well. I did not believe that individual man was in need of 'salvation': but I did believe that modern society was in need of salvation. More than any previous time, I felt with mounting certainty, this time of ours was in need of an ideological basis for a new social contract: it needed a faith that would make us understand the hollowness of material progress for the sake of progress alone - and nevertheless would give the life of this world its due; that would show us how to strike a balance between our spiritual and physical requirements: and thus save us from the disaster into which we were rushing headlong.


. . . . . . . . .

IT WOULD NOT BE too much to say that at this period of my life the problem of Islam - for it was a problem to me - occupied my mind to the exclusion of everything else, By now my absorption had outgrown its initial stages, when it had been no more than an intellectual interest in a strange, if attractive, ideology and culture: it had become a passionate search for truth. Compared with this search, even the adventurous excitement of the last two years of travel paled into insignificance: so much so that it became difficult for me to concentrate on writing the new book which the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung was entitled to expect of me.

At first Dr Simon viewed indulgently my obvious reluctance to proceed with the book. After all, I had just returned from my long journey and deserved some sort of holiday; my recent marriage seemed also to warrant a respite from the routine of writing. But when the holiday and the respite began to extent beyond what Dr Simon regarded as reasonable, he suggested that I should now come down to earth.

In retrospect, it seems to me that he was very understanding; but it did not seem so at the time. His frequent and urgent inquiries about the progress of 'the book' had an effect contrary to what he intended: I felt myself unduly imposed upon; and I began to detest the very thought of the book. I was more concerned with what I had still to discover than with describing what I had found so far.

In the end, Dr Simon made the exasperated observation: ' I don't think you will ever write this book. What you are suffering from is horror libri.'

Somewhat nettled, I replied: 'Maybe my disease is even more serious than that. Perhaps I am suffering from horror scribendi.'

'Well, if you are suffering from that,' he retorted sharply, ' do you think the Frankfurter Zeitung is the proper place for you?'

One word led to another and our disagreement grew into a quarrel. On the same day I resigned from the Frankfurter Zeitung and a week later left with Elsa for Berlin.

I did not, of course intend to give up journalism, for, apart from the comfortable livelihood and the pleasure (temporarily marred by 'the book') which writing gave me, it provided me with my only means of returning to the Muslim world: and to the Muslim world I wanted to return at any cost. But with the reputation I had achieved over the past four years, it was not difficult to make new press connections. Very soon after my break with Frankfurt, I concluded highly satisfactory agreements with three other newspapers: the Neue Zurcher Zeitung of Zurich, the Telegraaf of Amsterdam and the Kolnische Zeitung of Cologne. From now on my articles on the Middle East were to be syndicated by these three newspapers, which - though perhaps not comparable with the Frankfurter Zeitung - were among the most important in Europe.

For the time being Elsa and I settled down in Berlin, where I intended to complete my series of lectures at the Academy of Geopolitics and also to continue my Islamic studies.

My old literary friends were glad to see me back, but somehow it was not easy to take up the threads of our former relations at the point where they had been left dangling when I went to the Middle East. We had grown estranged; we no longer spoke the same intellectual language. In particular, from none of my friends could I elicit anything like understanding for my preoccupation with Islam. Almost to a man they shook their heads in puzzlement when I tried to explain to them that Islam, as an intellectual and social concept, could favourably compare with any other ideology. Although on occasion they might concede the reasonableness of this or that Islamic proposition, most of them were of the opinion that the old religions were a thing of the past, and that our time demanded a new, 'humanistic' approach. But even those who did not so sweepingly deny all validity to institutional religion were by no means disposed to give up the popular Western notion that Islam, being overly concerned with mundane matters, lacked the 'mystique' which one had a right to expect from religion.

It rather surprised me to discover that the very aspect of Islam which had attracted me in the first instance - the absence of a division of reality into physical and spiritual compartments and the stress on reason as a way to faith - appealed so little to intellectuals who otherwise were wont to claim for reason dominant role in life: it was in the religious sphere alone that they instinctively receded from their habitually so 'rational' and 'realistic' position. And in this respect I could discern no difference whatever between those few of my friends who were religiously inclined and the many to whom religion had ceased to be more than an outmoded convention.

In time, however, I came to understand where their difficulty lay. I began to perceive that in the eyes of people brought up within the orbit of Christian thought - with its stress on the 'supernatural' allegedly inherent in every true religious experience - a predominantly rational approach appeared to detract from a religion's spiritual value. This attitude was by no means confined to believing Christians. Because of Europe's long, almost exclusive association with Christianity, even the agnostic European had subconsciously learned to look upon all religious experience through the lens of Christian concepts, and would regard it as 'valid' only if it was accompanied by a thrill of numinous awe before things hidden and beyond intellectual comprehension. Islam did not fulfill this requirement: it insisted on a co-ordination of the physical and spiritual aspects of life on a perfectly natural plane. In fact, its world-view was so different from the Christian, on which most of the West's ethical concepts were based, that to accept the validity of the one inescapably led to questioning the validity of the other.

As for myself, I knew now that I was being driven to Islam; but a last hesitancy made me postpone the final, irrevocable step. The thought of embracing Islam was like the prospect of venturing out onto a bridge that spanned an abyss between two different worlds: a bridge so long that one would have to reach the point of no return before the other end became visible. I was well aware that if I became a Muslim I would have to cut myself off from the world in which I had grown up. No other outcome was possible. One could not really follow the call of Muhammad and still maintain one's inner links with a society that was ruled by diametrically opposed concepts. But - was Islam truly a message from God or merely the wisdom of a great, but fallible man...?


. . . . . . . .

ONE DAY - it was in September 1926 - Elsa and I found ourselves travelling in the Berlin subway. It was an upper-class compartment. My eye fell casually on a well-dressed man opposite me, apparently a well-to-do businessman, with a beautiful briefcase on his knees and large diamond ring on his hand. I though idly how well the portly figure of this man fitted into the picture of prosperity which one encountered everywhere in Central Europe in those days: a prosperity the more prominent as it had come after years of inflation, when all economic life had been topsy-turvy and shabbiness of appearance the rule. Most of the people were now well dressed and well fed, and the man opposite me was therefore no exception. But when I looked at his face, I did not seem to be looking at a happy face. He appeared to be worried: and not merely worried but acutely unhappy, with eyes staring vacantly ahead and the corners of his mouth drawn in as if in pain - but not in bodily pain. Not wanting to be rude, I turned my eyes away and saw next to him a lady of some elegance. She also had a strangely unhappy expression on her face, as if contemplating or experiencing something that caused her pain; nevertheless, her mouth was fixed in the stiff semblance of a smile which, I was certain, must have been habitual. And then I began to look around at all the other faces in the compartment - faces belonging without exception to well-dressed, well-fed people: and in almost everyone of them I could discern an expression of hidden suffering, so hidden that the owner of the face seemed to be quite unaware of it.

This was indeed strange. I had never before seen so many unhappy faces around me: or was it perhaps that I had never looked for what was now so loudly speaking in them? The impression was so strong that I mentioned it to Elsa; and she too began to look around her with the careful eyes of a painter accustomed to study human features. Then she turned to me, astonished, and said: 'You are right. They all look as though they were suffering torments of hell...I wonder, do they know themselves what is going on in them?'

I knew that they did not - for otherwise they could not go on wasting their lives as they did, without any faith in binding truths, without any goal beyond the desire to raise their own 'standard of living', without hopes other than having more material amenities, more gadgets, and perhaps more power....

When we returned home, I happened to glance at my desk on which lay open a copy of the Koran I had been reading earlier. Mechanically, I picked the book up to put it away, but just as I was about to close it, my eye fell on the open page before me, and I read:

You are obsessed by greed for more and more
Until you go down to your graves.
Nay, but you will come to know!
Nay, but you will come to know!
Nay, if you but knew it with the knowledge of certainty,
You would indeed see the hell you are in.
In time, indeed, you shall see it with the eye of certainty:
And on that Day you will be asked what you have done
with the boon of life.

For a moment I was speechless. I think the book shook in my hands. Then I handed it to Elsa. 'Read this. Is it not an answer to what we saw in the subway?'

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: for although it had been placed before man over thirteen centuries ago, it clearly anticipated something that could have become true only in this complicated, mechanized, phantom-ridden age as ours.

At all times people have known greed: but at no time before this had greed outgrown a mere eagerness to acquire things and become an obsession that blurred the sight of everything else: an irresistible craving to get, to do, to contrive more and more - more today than yesterday, and more tomorrow than today: a demon riding on the necks of men and whipping their hearts forward toward goals that tauntingly glitter in the distance but dissolve into contemptible nothingness as soon as they are reached, always holding out the promise of new goals ahead - goals still more brilliant, more tempting as long as they lie on the horizon, and bound to whither into further nothingness as soon as they come within grasp: and that hunger, that insatiable hunger for ever new goals gnawing at man's soul: Nay, if you but knew it you would see the hell you are in...

This, I saw, was not the mere human wisdom of a man of a distant past in distant Arabia. However wise he may have been, such a man could not by himself have foreseen the torment so peculiar to this twentieth century. Out of the Koran spoke a voice greater than the voice of Muhammad...



- * -

DARKNESS HAS FALLEN over the courtyard of the Prophet's Mosque, broken through only by the oil lamps which are suspended on long chains between the pillars of the arcades. Shaykh Abdullah ibn Bulayhid sits with his head sunk low over his chest and his eyes closed. One who does not know him might think that he has fallen asleep; but I know that he has been listening to my narrative with deep absorption, trying to fit it into the pattern of his own wide experience of men and their hearts. After a long while he raises his head and opens his eyes:

'And then? And what didst thou do then?'

'The obvious thing, O Shaykh. I sought out a Muslim friend of mine, an Indian who was at that time head of the small Muslim community in Berlin, and told him that I wanted to embrace Islam. He stretched out his right hand toward me, and I placed mine in it and, in the presence of two witnesses, declared: "I bear witness that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is His Messenger."* A few weeks later my wife did the same.'

'And what did thy people say to that?'

'Well, they did not like it. When I informed my father that I had become a Muslim, he did not even answer my letter. Some months later my sister wrote, telling me that he considered me dead... thereupon I sent him another letter, assuring him that my acceptance of Islam did not change anything in my attitude toward him or my love for him; that, on the contrary, Islam enjoined upon me to love and honour my parents above all other people...But this letter also remained unanswered.'

'Thy father must indeed be strongly attached to his religion...'

'No, O Shaykh, he is not; and that is the strangest part of the story. He considers me, I think, a renegade, not so much from his faith (for that has never held him strongly) as from the community in which he grew up and the culture to which he is attached.'

'And has thou never seen him since?'

'No. Very soon after our conversion, my wife and I left Europe; we could not bear to remain there any longer. And I have never gone back...'**