MUHAMMAD ASAD AND THE ROAD TO MECCA: Text of Muhammad Asad's Interview with Karl Gunter Simon. It was originally published in German in "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (F.A.Z) in 1988. It was translated into English by Elma Ruth Harder, and was published in 1998 in Journal "Islamic Studies".
MUHAMMAD ASAD AND THE ROAD TO MECCA: Text of Muhammad Asad's Interview with Karl Gunter Simon. It was originally published in German in "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (F.A.Z) in 1988. It was translated into English by Elma Ruth Harder, and was published in 1998 in Journal "Islamic Studies".
Original Title
Text of Muhammad Asad's Interview with
Karl Gunter Simon
MUHAMMAD ASAD AND THE ROAD TO MECCA: Text of Muhammad Asad's Interview with Karl Gunter Simon. It was originally published in German in "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (F.A.Z) in 1988. It was translated into English by Elma Ruth Harder, and was published in 1998 in Journal "Islamic Studies".
MUHAMMAD ASAD AND THE ROAD TO MECCA: Text of Muhammad Asad's Interview with Karl Gunter Simon. It was originally published in German in "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" (F.A.Z) in 1988. It was translated into English by Elma Ruth Harder, and was published in 1998 in Journal "Islamic Studies".
ARCHIVES MUHAMMAD ASAD AND THE ROAD TO MECCA Text of Muhammad Asad's Interview with Karl Gunter Simon (fr.) ELMA Rum HARDER The white village hangs on the cliffs over that sunny coastline about which the Spaniards occasionally say: "Gibraltar might be ours once again, but never again the COSia del Sol". With its old church, the pilgrimage grotto, and the picturesque Plaza de Toros, the village is ext remely interesting for anthropologists and sociologists , and has inspired three books. Twenty years.ago eight thousand inhabitants lived here. two thirds on their little farms in the fields . Their life was burdensome. The villagers, excepting the large landowners, were bitterly poor. "In this year. 1988", says the nice Danish woman at the foreign office in Ayuntamiento , "we have 16,000 Spaniards and 32,000 mristas residenles - cOllage dwellers from 52 countries" . The vegetables are expensive, the fields have become trim residential gardens, the farmers have become bricklayers and waiters, and innumerable bars serve fried chicken or fish and chips , Donkeys carry tourists, and speedy mopeds screech throughout the night. The village , hardly accessible by car twenty years ago, appears today as one of the richest Spanish communities . The new city hall costs three million Marks . One of the thousands of new houses is called Dar al -Andalus . That is the Arabic word for house. Although it appears Arabic-Spanish, Elma Ruth Harder teaches at the Inlernational School of Islamabad, The article was originally published in Frank/uner Allgemeillt lilung on November 18, 1988, The lranslator is gr3leFuilO Ron Peters for going through lhe fi rst draft of the translation and for making valuable suggeslions. 534 <A., W T ~ " s""oNIMuhammbd And and n . ~ R<nd fa MecclI Andalus actually has Gennan roots, The Vandals were the first Germans 10 seek the sun here. An Afghan shepherd dog sits like a siame beyond the garden walL A woman opens the door. She is North American. tells the curious taxi driver. who has strayed out here for the first lime, ' ... and my husband is Austrian-Pakistani", which all seems rather complicated. Which language is best? "English". says the man at the door, "but Arabic and Gennan are fine" . And a bit later: "Whom do you still know from the Frank/llrter (Allgemeine) Zeitung? Benno Reinfenberg, Paul Medina or Dr Heinrich Simon"? Personally. I know no one, not even Simon. In Berlin? "J mel Ben Brecht in the Cafe des Westen, or was it in the Romanisches Cafe? Marlene Dietrich ..... Murnau. Do you remember Colin Ross"? Only the name. "We were the two travel reporters . Colin Ross and I - yes, I. that is. Leopold Weiss . . .' Leopold Weiss has been forgotten. Muhammad Asad is famous, at least in the Islamic world. This year he turns 88. "To achieve the rebirth of Islam we should not seek new models from the outside . We just need to revive the old forgonen prinCiples . Foreign cultures may give us new impulses, but the perfect workshop of Islam cannot be replaced by anything un-Islamic, regardless of whether it originates in the West or the East. The spiritual and social institutions of Islam cann()( be improved upon. What seems to be the downfall of Islam is in truth just the death and the emptiness in our hearts . ,, " A polemic of the Muslim brotherhood? A proclamation of fundamentalists, whoever they might be? Not at all. These modern statements are found in an old book Islam at the Crossroads. written in 1933. This was the first book by Muhammad Asad. but not quite the first for the author. Twenty-four-year-old Leopold Weiss had written 'flIe Unromantic East. reports published by the Frankfurter Zeitung. But with the second book, his pen went on strike. He wanted 10 gel away from Frankfurt , home 10 the East . At thirty-two he wrote. "Far away. as in a dream, lies my Western pas!. It is not unreal enough to be forgotten. and not real enough to be a part of my present. Whenever I remain in a city for several months, an unrest grows within me, an urging to do and to move, towards the dry, fresh air of the desert, to the smelt of the camels and their rocking gait. . . " Heinr ich Simon, the nephew of Leopold Sonnemann. the founder of the Frankfurter liitung, fired his star writer. Leopold Weiss became Muhammad Asad . the reporter - a scholar of Islam. Arab Muslims first told me of Muhammad Asad. [ read his Principle of State and Government in !sIam, a slim publication which /sYmJc Studies 37:4 11998) gains weight with time as Muslims in politics seek their rools . And it was Arabs who entrusted me with The Road to Mecca", the autobiography that ends in 1932. Muhammad Asad decided, at 32, to leave Arabia and travel eastward 10 India. From then on his biography can only be reconstructed from fragments. Pakistan. New York, and then . .. ? German Muslims told me they had seen the old Muhammad Asad in Makkah as a pilgrim. He was living in Tangien. Finally a German ambassador, himself a Muslim, pointed us in the right direction. The white village, Dar al-Andalus. "He grants no interviews anymore", Mrs Pola Hamida tens us, but the name Frankfurter has perhaps made him sentimental. We sit at supper. Salmon from the supermarket in Marbella and fresh black German bread. "The best bread", says the old master, "was made by a baker in L'vov', I still have the taste on my tongue". L'vov'! "Well. yes, Lemberg, that was then Austria. Do you know that Lemberg comes from ' lowe' (lion), and when I converled to Islam in Berlin in 1926, the Indian Imam said to me, 'you are called Leopold, and leo means lion - therefore we take the Arabic name for lion, Asad' ". L'vov, Lemberg in 190Cl was "a long street of somewhat dusty elegance, lined by chestnut trees and laid with small wooden bricks which muffle the hoofbeats of the horses and render every hour of the day into a lazy afternoon. I loved this lovely street with a much greater awareness than befit my young age, and not JUSt because it was my childhood street. I loved it, I believe, for the stateliness with which it flowed from the lively centre of that most lively of all cities gradually to the edge of the city and then into the quiet of the woods and to the great cemetery, which found itself in the midst of the forest. Beautiful wagons passed occasionally on their rubber wheels to the lively, rhythmic trap- trap of horse hooves . Yet in the winter, when the street was CQvered foot-deep in snow, the sleighs flew over it and steam clouds issued from the nostrils of the hones, and their bells jingled in the frosty air ... " "Do you also find", says Mrs Pola Hamida at the supper table, "that today the German written in the newspapers is wone than then"? Well, yes. after the war, presumably under the influence of the Americans, a magazine style took hold, and whoever has written such for a few years can never get out of it. "No, no" , says the old Mr Weiss-As ad, "nO{ JUSt in the Stern or Spiegel, but also in the newspapen. The Frankfurter ZeilUlIg of that time ... " In German, LwQw. AU proper names have lottn given their equivatent English spellings. 536 _MIl GUtlIEA Asad and The Road 10 He learned Gennan from his father, Polish from his mother. His father, a welJ. placed allorney, was born in the Bukovina region as son of the rabbi at Czernowitz; his mother was the child of a rich banker in L 'yav. Thirteen-year-old Leopold read Sienkiewicz in Polish, Karl May, Nietzsche and Rilke in German, and the Torah and Talmud in Hebrew and Aramaic, "Theological and philosophical ways of thinking did not slir me seriously at that time; that which I longed for deep inside did not differentiate itself intrinsically from desires and expectations of other boys my age - action aoo exercise and adventure, .. The firs! decade of the European twentieth century stood under the sign of a spi ritual emptiness. Most of the moral values, which for hundreds of years had been considered steadfast, were shattered under the terrible jolt of the world war, and no new values were at hand, to replace those which were lost. All seemed fragile. A feeling of inner insecurity hovered over the people, a premonition of conununal and spiritual revolution, which left almost everyone doubting whether mankind's deed and thought would ever again anain the old firmness and constancy. Everything seemed 10 flow there in a shapeless flood, and the spiritual unrest of youth was unable to find a secure footing anywhere ". This trend is noteworthy and well known. Also those who were born a generation later experienced and discovered the same thing after Ihe end of the second world war in this century. Can man save himself by merely resorting to adventure, or does he need any other deeds? He smuggled hilll'lelf, as a ful1grown fourteen- year-old, into the Austrian army, but his father brought him back. When he reached the age of military service, the war was almost over. He experienced the University in Vienna, hunger in Prague, his first small successes in Berl in. He worked as a theat rical assistant for Mumau as a telephone operator, and finally, as a reporter for a news agency. "And one day, in the spring of 1922, I received a letter from my Uncle Dorian". Uncle Dorian, Viennese student of Freud. administered a lunatic asylum in Jerusalem. "As he was a stranger to Zionism and had not much use for Arabs and in addition was a bachelor, he felt himself alone in a world which had nothing more 10 offer him than work and income, and in this lonesomeness he remembered his nephew. And so I found myself on the deck of a ship on my way to the East ". The trip became a turning point in the life of the twenty-two-year- old. "I stood face to face with a totally new sensation. A warm human breath streamed from the blood of the Arabs in their thoughts and gestures; there was none of that painful soul-splitting to be seen, those 's,.mi<; Studies 37:4 (1998) 531 ghosts of fear, greed and inner dispossession which made European life so ugly and hopeless. Something began to open itself to me from the Arabs, something which I had always unknowingly been seeking. There was an emotional immediacy in every experience, an instinctive openness to all questions of existence - a reason of the heart, one could say" . Destiny or chance? He once again became a journalist. "I wrote an essay on my impressions in Palestine and sent copies of it to ten German papers, with the offer to report regularly from the Middle East . . .Just one of the len accepted my offer - apparently impressed by my essay - appointed me special correspondent to the Near East, and simultaneously proposed the draft of a contract for a book which I should write on my return. This paper was the Frankfurter Zeilung. Yet there was a hook with it. Due to inflation, the Frankfurter Zeitung was not in the position to pay me in English pounds. The honourarium offered to me, with a certain apologetic gesture, looked very impressive in German currency, but J knew very well, just as well as the editor's office, that it would hardly suffice for the stamps to post my articles ' . The reporter travelled . . . on foot, on horseback, on swaying dromedaries. .. to Egypt. Syria. Transj ordan, Persia. He rode to Afghanistan through the wilderness of Saudi Arabia. His articles made him well known, not only in Germany, but also in the Arab press. He learned Arabic and Persian and started to study the Qur'an and Muslim writers. And in Berlin in 1926 he decided to take the incredibly unusual step: he converted to Islam. ' I can, without exageration, say that at that point in my life, Islam filled my thoughts to the ellclusion of all other problems. Gone were the days when I wnsidered this teaching at my leisure and gave myself in a carefree manner to those attractions which ellerted new and strange weltanschauung and culture on my spirit. From then on my preoccupation with Islam became a passionate search for truth. In comparison to this search even the adventurous discovery of the previous two years completely faded - so very faded that it was difficult for me to gather myself together to write the new travel book to which the Frankfurter Zei/wIg was entitled. Thoughts of the book became odious. [ felt more and more impelled 10 make new discoveries , rather than to write about the old ones" . So it came to the break with the Frankfurter ZeilUng. The man with the new name returned to the Orient and henceforth wrote for the Neue Zurcher ZeilUng, the Dutch Telegraaf and the Kolnische 'ZeilUng under the name Weiss-Asad. Mrs Pola Hamida gets the photo album which she had put together for her husband, after she had found the old negatives: clay palaces, the author in Arab garb, his Bedouin wife with and without veil, many famous leaders of the East who have long been history already- luminaries like 'Abd al-'Aiil ibn Sa'lid, F a y ~ a l ; his son and heir, the Great Sanilsi; Reza Khan, the late Shah of Persia. Actually, when one sees his life, he must have been as famous as Lawrence of Arabia. Does it depend on the name? ' Well, yes", says Muhammad Asad, smiling, "Lawrence had a good biographer - Lowell Thomas made him famous'. Lawrence has become an English legend. Though he was a friend of the Arabs, he sti1J remained English. "And I - I crossed over to the other camp' . Henceforth he was a man of the Islamic world. 'Abd aJ -'AlIZ ibn Sa'lid, the new King of Saudi Arabia, gave him his trust and friendship. Six years in Riyad and MadTnah and long rides through the wilderness made him into an Arab. He dressed as a Bedouin, spoke Bedouin Arabic, and had a wife and child in Madinah. In 1929 he rode as a secret agent for his Arab ruler to Kuwait. The English, he discovered, were supponing the Beduoin uprising in the nonh against the central rule of the King. Maria Theresa thalers and anns were landing in Kuwait . The English wanted to weaken 'Abd al-'Alil and they planned a naval base in the Persian Gulf and a rail line from Haifa to Basra. A series of ankles by Muhammad Asad led to the collapse of these plans . Another life threatening mission failed. The Great Saniisi who lived in Madinah sent the young Muslim through British Egypt to Libya, where the Saniisi Brotherhood fought desperately against the It alian invasion. The messenger, chased by the Italians, turned back without having accomplished anything. The guerilla fighters, cut off from all supplies, died in concentration camps, on the gallows of the Italians. This proved to be a quickly forgotten episode, but perhaps also a key to the character of Libyan politics? The picture of King 'Abd al -'Aziz ibn Sa'lid has a place of honour in the living room. "When King Faisal, Ibn Saud's son, was murdered", says Mrs Pola Hamida, "I saw my husband cry for the only time in his life". And why did he become a Muslim? Was it the fascination of the East? "I want to tell you a story", says Muhammad Asad. "During the second world war. [ was interned in India. I was the only Muslim among three thousand Nazis and a hundred Ami-Fascists. One day in the camp, I came into conversation with the Prince of Lowenstein_ who was a Jesuit and a missionary. 'You were born a Jew', he said to me, 'and naturally the next step would be to become a Christian'. I asked him if he could answer a question I had: 'What is the trinity'? ' Oh' _ said the Prince, I$gmic SlVdi'l!l 31:4 (19981 539 'that is a mystery, when you have faith, then your hean will understand . .. ' Do you see, that is why I am a Muslim. Islam says, 'Use your intellect, and you will fmd faith' ". The dedication of his life's work, the translation of the Qur'in, states: /i-qawmin ymajakkaran, "for people who think". And what of the Sufis, the mystics? "Mysticism means to deepen religious thinking and feeling. But the basis is not feeling, it is intellect". Up to this point Muhammad Asad has written his own life story, but it is merely the first chapter of a long life. His autobiographical book, The Road to Mecca, begins in Lemberg and ends in the Holy City, which stands at the centre of the Islamic world. He was thiny-two years old when he left the Arabs - and yet the book seems n()(ably complete, as if he had finished his goal. "He is a Bedouin", says Mrs Pola, "we have always wandered". He possessed, however unsellled his life was, a gjft fo r making friendships. He remained close to his Saudi friends all his life long. "[n Medina I learned to know many Indian Muslims. I wanted to be in India for a year". In Lahore, Muhammad Asad met Muhammad Iqbal, the writer now honoured as spiritual father of Pakistan, and again a friend determined his life's direction. He made a friend for life. Iqbal, surprised by the sharp. outspoken young Muslim. persuaded him to stay in Lahore and work for the cause of Islam. In 1933. Islam at the Crossroads appeared. This was a book that held a clear mirror before all Muslims, not just for the Indians. It showed hard realities and also the direction to a new way. "Islamic society is ossified", writes Asad. the lion. "It can absorb the stimuli of a technically superior civilization, namely that of the West, but it must return to its own roots, to overcome the decadence. Prophet Muhammad had advocated the seeking of knowledge, the principle of Ij lihad, the eJtertion of one's own jUdgment, was the basis of the great Arab civilzation. European thought. the age of science which has lasted till now, would not have occurred without the stimuli of the Arabs. Thanks to Islam, the European Renaissance freed itself of the chains of the church of the middle ages, for the science of the Arabs and the Persians had its roots in the teachings of the Prophet. Only in the following centuries when the Abbasids and Mamluks ruled, was the door of ijtihad locked. The principle of taqlid - blind acctptence wilhout one's own judgmem - ruled and created the decadence of the Islamic world". Muhammad Asad later told the periodical Arabia: "To turn away the evil of Western civilization is one thing; to accept their benefits is 540 . ..... GONHR SlMONlMuhllmmMl Asod and ~ RQ8d to Mece, another. I likely would have never become a Muslim if the schools of Europe had not instructed my understanding ". A critic of his books writes that Muhammad Asad was against the politicians and against the "mullahs. With Ihis statement in fact he has hit the sore exactly. Till today the Islamic world is looking for this narrow way which runs between two rocks and promises salvation. The politicians open themselves up [0 Westernizati on and thereby give up their roots; the mullahs hold fast to their roots, but they become rigid. The politicians - Bbulla in Pakistan or the Shah of Persia - have failed up to now; the rigid mullahs, as in Khomeini ' s Iran, offer no promising future perspecti ve. The right way leads through the middle. that also is wisdom of the Qur'an, an instruction for "people who think ' , /i-qawmin yata/akkarW! . In 1946 Asad went to Kashmir and founded a periodical, which he himself wrote. It was called Am/at like the plain before the gates of Makkah where pilgrims spend the 9th day of Dhu']-Hijjah in huge camps . In 1941 Pakistan was born as the only modern state to be established on the fundamentals of Islam. In the bloody disorder which accompanied the partitioning of British India, even the library of tbe scholar was destroyed. His translation of the Hadith of Bukhari, that monumental collection of teachings of the Prophet [peace be on him]. was never completed. The scholar who at one lime had been a reponer then moved into pol it ics. The government called him to the Department of Islamic Reconstruction, whose mandate was to build the ideological framework for the new Islamic state. "He has forgotten a few years", says Muhanunad Asad. From 19)9 to 1945 he sat in an internment camp. "I was the only Muslim, and the Muslim soldiers who watched me wanted to let me escape, but I steered away from that". And what did he do in the camp, for six long years? "Nothing. We were housed in seventy-man barracks. What could we do there? Once, at Christmas, we fought with the Fascists - we won, because we were sober and they were drunk ". ' Six years - a man's best years ", says Mrs Pola. "The black hole is a richly coloured biography. We have forgotten it ". The black hole: things forgonen, repressed , flashes of intense memories which sink back into the merciful darkness. "My father disappeared in Theresienstadt. After the Anschluss I had supplied him with a visa to the Punjab, but he did not want to flee without his daughter. When I also sent my sister a visa, she lost the letter. She died in Auschwitz". "Tell the story about the oil", says Mrs Pola. fst.mic Studies 37:4 (1 9981 5" "Oh, yes, the English accused me, as confidant of Ibn Sa'ud, of obtaining the oil concession for the Americans and not the English, It was all madness" . "Then we would be millionaires today", says Mrs Pola. In 1949 Muhammad Asad joined the diplomatic service of Pakistan. He, of course, took charge of the Middle East Departmeru. In 1950 he went back to visit Arabia . "There was still flO passpon law, I declined to travel with a British passport and received the very first Pakistani passpon". Until then he had had an old Austrian passpon. He replied to a written summons from the German consul to become a pan-German citizen with his response "GOtz from Berlichingen' . In 1952 Pakistan sent him as representative to the UN in New York. As Chairman of the Commission of Non-Selfgoverned Territories , he argued for the independence of Tunisia. Burgiba later invited him as a state guest. In New York, the third chapter in the life of Muhammad Asad- Leopold Weiss began. He met Pola. This American woman had become a Muslim even before she met the diplomat. "He fascinated me ' . she recalls , "with his brilliance". (Asad now divorced his wife from Saudi Arabia.j The Pakistan Foreign Office refused to agree to the marriage. Asad quickly decided, as he often had in life, to leave the diplomatic service: he started to write once more . The Road to Mecca appeared in nine months, the story of his youth and his conversion. The book was a success, and fIOt only in Muslim oountries. "Allah alone knows", wrote the periodical Arabia thirty years later, "how many other convens were on their way to faith because of this rousing book'. It was translated into Japanese, Malaysian. Serbo- Croatian and nine other languages. The film version with Gregory Peck as Muhammad Asad, remained a plan. The publisher, Gottfried Beermann-Fischer, who met the author in New York, invited him to write the German version in Germany. For a year, Leopold Weiss-Asad lived with his wife Pola in Badenweiler, in the house of Annette Kolb. The Black Forest had 00 more hold on him than did Frankfun. The East beckoned him again, as unromantic as if was. He spem two years in Beirut, where he wrote The Principles of State and Government in Islam, a bri11iant theory of the Islamic state, going back to the roots of the Qur'lin and the Sunnah. He lived in Pakistan another year, then again attempted to find his way back to Europe to his own roots. He lived in Switzerland for six yeaTli, where he started his major work, the English translation of the Qur'an. "I calculated it would take two years, then it became seventeen years. One digs deeper and deeper". 542 These were modes! words for a major work. Whoever pages through the book's thousand dense pages must think, 'Oh good, one of eighty-five English translations', but then one gets lost in the fullness of the commentary, the richness of the thought, which builds a bridge between two worlds. And doesn't just seek counsel of the authorities like BukharT, Ibn Rushd to 'Abduh. He has learned the complex language at its source with Ibe Bedouins in tbe Arabian wilderness. "All translators", he writes in the forward, were people who acquired their knowledge of Arabic through academic study alone: thai is, from books. But the Arabic of the Quran is the language of a people endowed with that pe1:uliar quick-wittedness which the desert and its expanses inspires, the language of people whose mental images quickly, and without mediation, fly, flowing without effort from association to association- sequences of thought that slowl y approach the idea which they aim to ellpress". Every translation of such a language will necessarily be ils own interpretation. The famous ayah 190 in Sara( al-Baqarah, to give just one example, is translated by Asad like this: And fight in God's cause against those who wage war against you, but do not commit - for, verily, God does oot love aggressors", The oldest reference to jihiul, the idea which is so often misunderstood in the West, is here clearly defined: a prohibition of offensive war, a for defense, Asad the key to understanding of this great and mysterious book in the SUrah AI-'Intrall, dyah 7: "He it is who has bestowed upon thee front Oil high this divine writ, containing messages that are clear in and by themselves - and these are the essence of the divine writ - as well as others that are allegoricaL Now those whose hearts are given to swerving from the truth go after that part of tbe divine writ which has been ellpressed in allegory, seeking out (what is bound to create) confusion, and seeking (to arrive at) its final meaning (in an arbitrary manner); but none save God knows its final meaning". "It is this verse", conunenls Asad, "in its absolute sense, which gives the key to undersfaooing the Quranic message which makes the whole accessible to the people who think", The unambiguous signs (ayar muhkamdt) have but one meaning, but the allegorical signs (dydt mutaslulbiMt) spell out what lies beyond the human cognition. " It is this conctp( that builds the foundation for the understanding of the Quran and the principles of religion in general, for all religious knowledge builds on the fact that only a small portion of the Isl.mic Studms 37:4 (1998) '" reality of human thought and human fantasy is accessible and the larger ponion is locked from comprehension". Asad cont inuall y emphasizes the rationality of Islam: "Most surely the Quran is disregarded in the West because in one aspect it differs from all other scriptures: it stresses reason as a way to faith, and it assens the inseparability of the spiritual and the physical spheres of human existence". The Message of the Qur'lln appeared in 1980, the author's eightieth year of life, the culmination of a life's work which began with travel pictures on the first page of the FranJifurter Zeitung. The reporter viewed; the politician did; the wise man understood. These have been the three chapters of his life. Lawrence of Arabia pales into insignificance. In 1987, after fourteen years in T"flgiers, and then four years in Portugal, Muhammad Asad moved to Marbella, where the Arabs live in the summer. When I visited him, he had just moved again. to the white village we cannot name. The man wants his peace. In one of his essays, he speaks of "mutual distrust" between Arabs aoo Europeans. He explains it like this: ' It still stems from the time of the crusades. The European encounters other strange religions, say Buddhism, without prejudice, but the aversion to Islam lies deep in his unconscious". Doesn't it also lie in the character of the Arabs, whom we Europeans have a hard time understanding? Arabs seem, especially in association with journalists, often locked and inaccessible. "No, no, Arabs are open and good-natured". says Asad, who has never felt himself so much at home with friends as in Saudi Arabia. At that time, I add. there were no terrorists, no fanatic combat organizations like Hizb Allah or al-Jihad-al-lslami. Isn't it understandable that the people of the West become shocked with Khomeni ? "Khomeni has done for Islam what Hitler did for Germany', says Muhammad Asad. He smiles, "He was, by the way. born in the same year as I". He takes off his glasses. "Have you read Koestler - The Thirteenth Race? Koestler has maintained that the Ashkinazi, the Eastern Jews, didn't even descend from the Jews, but from the Chasaren, the descendents of a Turkish race from the Central Steppes, from where the Mongols also came. Look at me ... " Age has drawn his features sharper, the cheekbones protrude, the eyes lie in narrow slits. "And when you speak of fanaticism, the Quran clearly says in the second Surah, We have wished thai you be a people of the middle way. The Sunnah prohihits {aftit and ifrat, excess in small things as in large things. In the Sunnah 54' it also says, God has wished that which is easy for you, not the difficult " . In the evening. with chocolate mousse in the village tavern, he lapses into silence. ' Say something", says Mrs Poia, "I'm considering", says the old Bedouin quietly, "whether or not we should move again ... " It really is too lonely in [he white village, among all the turistas residentes.