A JOURNEY OF MY OWN
Tazin Abdullah
Macquire University, Sydney, Australia
e-mail: tazinabdullah@hotmail.com

I’d like to tell you about a book that I finished reading a couple of months ago - a book so fascinating, that I could not wait to get to the next chapter. The desire to know what happened next and eventually at the end, almost became an obsession. Yet, when I’d finished reading it, I wished I hadn't. Because I don't know if the next book I read will give me half the pleasure.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it. It’s called The Road to Mecca, written by Muhammad Asad. If you are after a book review, then perhaps I should warn that the next pages do not offer an objective or a detached view of the book. This piece is less the work of a critic and more the story of a journey that I myself went on – my road to my fitrah.

The Road to Mecca has had hundreds of reviews written about it since its first publication in 1954. I have seen some of those and read excerpts on the back cover of the copy I have. It struck me that I had never before heard of this book or this author – a book that papers of the stature of the New York Times had written about. In school, they taught me to read the works of fantastic authors called Harper Lee and Toni Morrison, so I could learn to write autobiographies and write like them. Yet, here was this amazing author called Muhammad Asad with this amazing piece of work and nobody ever bothered mentioning him. I guess they didn’t know.

I have asked myself why many times. Perhaps the absence of Muhammad Asad’s work in the ‘enlightened’ circles, that I grew up in, was owing to the contents of his book. Very convincingly, Asad enfeebles the values we hold sacred in the West. As much as it is the work of a mystic, it is also a rational and logical refutation of many of the ideas and the illusions that people populating both the West and the East today endorse. It is a blow to Western propaganda and to the same imperialism, which resulted in the want of the book in world I grew up. What makes it really bad (well, for us ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’ people) is, I guess, that the author was a European himself.

Formerly known as Leopold Weiss, he was originally Polish/Austrian and brought up to be Jewish. As he grew older, his rationale turned him towards atheism and further and further away from any form of organised religion. His interests in writing landed him a job as Middle-East correspondent for the famous Frankfurter Zeitung. The same man who spent hours in the cafes of Paris and Germany chatting away with his friends and then fought side-by-side with Umar-al-Mukhtar tells you the story of his amazing life. He tells you the story of his discovery of Islam.

Reading about his conversion to Islam was my original intention. That is all I knew about him when I first got the book. He was a Jew who had become Muslim and I wanted to know why. Really, why would anyone want to become Muslim?

To my surprise, that wasn't all that was there. The book was about much more than his conversion. In fact, I do not know what to say the book is "about". I don’t know how to categorise it. I suppose, for the sake of classification, one might call it an autobiography. But that doesn't do it justice, because it holds so much more.

If I had to identify it with the genres of writing that this book pertains to, I could call it an autobiography, a travelogue, a book about history, politics, culture, the story of a man finding his destiny, a lesson in and an insight into Islam, spirituality and mysticism. It can even be read as an exercise in learning how to write. You can begin to read this book for any of those purposes. You may want to know any of those things but I can assure you, you will not finish without having learnt everything else on the list.

The story of his life comes to us in fragments as the author travels through the desert - his destination being Mecca. As he reaches each destination and begins on the next part of his expedition, he opens the door to his memories. From when he was a child to his rebellion against canonical society and his travels through the Middle East, he brilliantly describes each place, its people, its history and his connection with it. He combines the events that shaped and determined his life with an insight that few possess. When he talks of his first time in Jerusalem, he not only tells you what he was doing there and how he got there. He tells you its history. He tells you the political conditions of the time and the place. He tells you of the culture. Then he gives you his understanding of the situation and in the process teaches you things textbooks cannot.

Muhammad Asad has the ability to embed into the story of his life, the story of whole tribes and nations. He talks about a lot more than his life but everything is so deftly intertwined with it, that it beautifies the story rather than diverts it. Reading it is like watching a movie. No, it is better than a movie. It is like sitting with him in Mecca, under a Bedouin tent, talking to the Grand Sanusi. It is like running with him through the barbed wire as the Italians chase him on the borders of Egypt. It is the tension as he risks his life to expose the treachery of the Zionists and the British. It is feeling the anger as Mussolini's soldiers torture and kill Libyan men, women and children. It is a personal renaissance – my age of enlightenment, reason and rationale.

Maybe he is able to do that because he lived through decisive times and was involved in important events that shaped history. Maybe his writing is amazing just because his life was amazing. Then I think that others lived at the same time he did. They had the same opportunities but Muhammad Asad chose to live the life that he did. He chose to break out of the confines of his culture and defy the periphery out of which he was not allowed to think.

Again, that question plays in my mind. Why did I not know about this book? Of all the books I have ever read, very few have come close to the literary qualities of this one. Asad has an incredible ability to hold a reader’s attention. His language is clear and his descriptions brilliant. He notices ordinary things about people and brings them to our attention as nothing less than extraordinary. He places the reader in the exact place and situation that he talks about. When he describes a flute playing, you can hear the music. When he describes a cold breeze on his wet face, you close your eyes because it feels so good.

So, why did the school library have Salman Rushdie's autobiography in Midnight's Children, why did it have The Diary of Anne Frank and not The Road to Mecca?

Was everyone so threatened by what Asad had to say? Was it so dangerous for me to know that a reality other than the one I knew existed? Was it so risky that I start to think and to question? Was it such a problem that I see beyond the boundaries constructed around me? Was it so bad that I learnt about Islam? I guess it was. After all, the indoctrination that the West revels in was at risk. I mean, their worst fears were only confirmed – I became Muslim.

They’ll probably try to make sure now that this book is read even less. Isn’t that so sad because it is such a treasury of knowledge and wisdom? It teaches the simple logic and rationality that we are too shortsighted to see – that we are never taught to see. It takes a reader beyond his/her petty judgments, it opens the mind to the world. And that’s regardless of who you are.

You don't need to be Muslim, Arab or European to read this book. You don't need to be anyone to read this book. You do not need to belong to prescribe to some sort of genre or be some particular sort of person. That is what is so amazing about it. You need not carry any baggage with you. Everything is supplied along the way.

At the end of Muhammad Asad's journey, you will have been ready to start yours. Just a word of caution – be ready to discover.