2026 Apr 04

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Title:

 Muhammad Asad

 

…

 

 

SPIRIT AND FLESH

 

My work at the Frankfurter Zeitung gave a strong impetus to my conscious thinking. With greater clarity than ever before, I began to relate my Eastern experiences to the Western world of which I was once again a part. Just as some months earlier I had discovered a connection between the emotional security of the Arabs and the faith they professed, it now began to dawn upon me that Europe's lack of inner integration and the chaotic state of its ethics might be an outcome of its loss of contact with the religious faith that had shaped Western civilization.

Here, I saw, was a society in search of a new spiritual orientation after it had abandoned God: but apparently very few Westerners realized what it was all about. The majority seemed to think, consciously or subconsciously, more or less along these lines: 'Since our reason, our scientific experiments and our calculations do not reveal anything definite about the origin of human life and its destinies after bodily death, we ought to concentrate all our energies on the development of our material and intellectual potential and not allow' ourselves to be hampered by transcendental ethics and moral postulates based on assumptions which defy scientific proof.' Thus, while Western society did not expressly deny God, it simply no longer had room for Him in its intellectual system.

In earlier years, after I had become disappointed with the religion of my ancestors, I had given some thought to Christianity. In my eyes, the Christian concept of God was infinitely superior to that of the Old Testament in that it did not restrict God's concern to anyone group of people but postulated His Fatherhood of all mankind. There was, however, an element in the Christian religious view that detracted from the universality of its approach: the distinction it made between the soul and the body, the world of faith and the world of practical affairs.

Owing to its early divorce from all tendencies aiming at an affirmation of life and of worldly endeavors, Christianity, I felt, had long ceased to provide a moral impetus to Western civilization. Its adherents had grown accustomed to the idea that it was not the business of religion to 'interfere' with practical life; they were content to regard religious faith as a soothing convention, meant to foster no more than a vague sense of personal morality -especially sexual morality -in individual men and women. In this they were assisted by the age-old attitude of a Church which, in pursuance of the principle of a division between 'that which is God's and that which is Caesar's', had left the entire field of social and economic activities almost untouched -with the result that Christian politics and business had developed in a direction entirely different from all that Christ had envisaged. In not providing its fol1owers with a concrete guidance in worldly affairs, the religion which the Western world professed had failed in what, to me, appeared to have been the true mission of Christ and, indeed, the cardinal task of every religion: to show man not merely how to feel but also how to live rightly. With an instinctive feeling of having been somehow let down by his religion, Western man had, over the centuries, lost all his real faith in Christianity; with the loss of this faith, he had lost the conviction that the universe was an expression of one Planning Mind and thus formed one organic whole; and because he had lost that conviction, he was now living in a spiritual and moral vacuum.

In the West's gradual falling away from Christianity I saw a revolt against the Pauline life-contempt that had so early, and so completely, obscured the teachings of Christ. How, then, could Western society still claim to be a Christian society? And how could it hope, without a concrete faith, to overcome its present moral chaos?

A world in upheaval and convulsion: that was our Western world. Bloodshed, destruction, violence on an unprecedented scale; the breakdown of so many social conventions, a clash of ideologies, an embittered, all-round fight for new ways of life: these were the signs of our time. Out of the smoke and the shambles of a world war, innumerable smaller wars and a host of revolutions and counter-revolutions, out of economic disasters that transcended anything until then recorded: out of all these tremendous happenings emerged the truth that the present-day Western concentration on material, technical progress could never by itself resolve the existing chaos into something resembling order. My instinctive, youthful conviction that 'man does not live by bread alone' crystallized into the intellectual conviction that the current adoration of 'progress' was no more than a weak, shadowy substitute for an earlier faith in absolute values a pseudo-faith devised by people who had lost all inner strength to believe in absolute values and were now deluding themselves with the belief that somehow, by mere evolutionary impulse, man would outgrow his present difficulties... I did not see how any of the new economic systems that stemmed from this illusory faith could possibly constitute more than a palliative for Western society's misery: they could, at best, cure some of its symptoms, but never the cause.

While I worked on the editorial staff of the Frankfurter Zeitung, I paid frequent visits to Berlin, where most of my friends resided.

***

In the spring of 1924the Frankfurter Zeitung sent me out on my second journey to the Middle East. The book describing my previous travels had at last been completed. (It was published a few months after my departure under the title Unromantisches Morgen/and-by which I meant to convey that it was not a book about the romantic, exotic outward picture of the Muslim East but rather an endeavor to penetrate to its day-by-day realities. Although its anti-Zionist attitude and unusual predilection for the Arabs caused something of a flutter in the German press, I am afraid it did not sell very well.)

Once again I crossed the Mediterranean and saw the coast of Egypt before me. The railway journey from Port Said to Cairo was like turning the leaves of a familiar book. Between the Suez Canal and Lake Manzala the Egyptian afternoon unfolded itself. Villages grew up out of the plain, which was at first sandy and sparsely covered with vegetation. I thought to myself: Nothing in the whole world -neither the most perfect automobile nor the proudest bridge nor the most thoughtful book -can replace this grace which has been lost in the West and is already threatened in the East -this grace which is nothing but an expression of the magic consonance between a human being's Self and the world that surrounds him...

This time I travelled first class. In the compartment there were only two passengers besides me: a Greek businessman from Alexandria who, with the ease so characteristic of all Levantines, soon involved me in an animated conversation and supplied witty observations on all we saw; and an Egyptian umda, a village headman, who -judging from his costly silk kaftan and the thick, gold watch chain that protruded from his sash -was obviously rich but seemed content to remain entirely uneducated. In fact, almost as soon as he joined our conversation, he readily admitted that he could neither read nor write; nevertheless, he also displayed a sharp common sense and frequently crossed swords with the Greek.

We were talking, I remember, about some of the social principles in Islam which at that time strongly occupied my thoughts. My Greek fellow traveler did not entirely agree with my admiration of the social equity in the Law of Islam. 'It is not as equitable as you seem to think, my dear friend' and, changing from the French, into which we had lapsed, into Arabic again for the benefit of our Egyptian companion, he now turned to him: 'You people say that your religion is so equitable. Couldst thou perhaps then tell us why it is that Islam allows Muslim men to marry Christian or Jewish girls but does not allow your daughters and sisters to marry a Christian or Jew? Dost thou call this justice, huh?'

'I do, indeed,' replied the portly umda without a moment's hesitation, 'and I shall tell thee why our religious law has been thus laid down. We Muslims do not believe that Jesus -may peace and God's blessing be upon him -was God's son, but we do consider him, as we consider Moses and Abraham and all the other Prophets of the Bible, a true Prophet of God, all of them having been sent to mankind in the same way as the Last Prophet, Muhammad -may God bless him and give him peace was sent: and so, if a Jewish or Christian girl marries a Muslim, she may rest assured that none of the persons who are holy to her will ever be spoken of irreverently among her new family; while, on the other hand, should a Muslim girl marry a non-Muslim, it is certain that he whom she regards as God's Messenger will be abused... and perhaps even by her own children: for do not children usually follow their father's faith? Dost thou think it would be fair to expose her to such pain and humiliation?

The Greek had no answer to this except an embarrassed shrug of his shoulders; but to me it seemed that the simple, illiterate umda had, with that common sense so peculiar to his race, touched the kernel of a very important problem. And once again as with that old hajji in Jerusalem, I felt that a new door to Islam was being opened to me.

 

On the third day after my arrival, at sunset, I heard the muffled sound of cannon from the Citadel. At the same moment a circle of lights sprang up on the highest galleries of the two minarets that flanked the Citadel mosque; and all the minarets of all the mosques in the city took up that illumination and repeated it: on every minaret a similar circle of lights. Through old Cairo there went a strange movement; quicker and at the same time more festive became the step of the people, louder the polyphonous noise in the streets: you could sense and almost hear a new tension quiver at all corners.

And all this happened because the new crescent moon announced a new month (for the Islamic calendar goes by lunar months and years), and that month was Ramadan, the most solemn month of the Islamic year. It commemorates the time, more than thirteen hundred years ago, when, according to tradition, Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran.

Strict fasting is expected of every Muslim during this month. Men and women, save those who are ill, are forbidden to take food or drink (and even to smoke) from the moment when the first streak of light on the eastern horizon announces the coming dawn, until sunset: for thirty days. During these thirty days the people of Cairo went around with glowing eyes, as if elevated to holy regions. In the thirty nights you heard cannon fire, singing and cries of joy, while all the mosques glowed with light until daybreak.

Twofold, I learned, is the purpose of this month of fasting. One has to abstain from food and drink in order to feel in one's own body what the poor and hungry feel: thus, social responsibility is being hammered into human consciousness as a religious postulate. The other purpose of fasting during Ramadan is self-discipline -an aspect of individual morality strongly accentuated in all Islamic teachings (as, for instance, in the total prohibition of all intoxicants, which Islam regards as too easy an avenue of escape from consciousness and responsibility). In these two elements -brotherhood of man and individual self-discipline -I began to discern the outlines of Islam's ethical outlook.

In my endeavor to gain a fuller picture of what Islam really meant and stood for, I derived great benefit from the explanations which some of my Cairene Muslims friends were able to provide me. Outstanding among them was Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi, one of the most prominent Islamic scholars of the time and certainly the most brilliant among the ulama of Al-Azhar University (he was destined to become its rector some years later). He must have been in his middle forties at that time, but his stocky, muscular body had the alertness and vivacity of a twenty-year-old. In spite of his erudition and gravity, his sense of humor never left him. A pupil of the great Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abduh, and having associated in his youth with that inspiring firebrand, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, Shaykh Al-Maraghi was himself a keen, critical thinker. He never failed to impress upon me that the Muslims of recent times had fallen very short indeed of the ideals of their faith, and that nothing could be more erroneous than to measure the potentialities of Muhammad's message by the yardstick of present-day Muslim life and thought, -just as,' he said, 'it would be erroneous to see in the Christians' unloving behavior toward one another a refutation of Christ's message of love...' With this warning, Shaykh Al-Maraghi introduced me to Al-Azhar.

Out of the crowded bustle of Mousky Street, Cairo's oldest shopping Centre, we reached a small, out-of-the-way square, one of its sides occupied by the broad, straight front of the Azhar Mosque. Through a double gate and a shadowy forecourt we entered the courtyard of the mosque proper, a large quadrangle surrounded by ancient arcades. Students dressed in long, dark jubbas and white turbans were sitting on straw mats and reading with low voices from their books and manuscripts. The lectures were given in the huge, covered mosque-hall beyond. Several teachers sat, also on straw mats, under the pillars which crossed the hall in long rows, and in a semicircle before each teacher crouched a group of students. The lecturer never raised his voice, so that it obviously required great attention and concentration not to miss any of his words. One should have thought that such absorption would be conducive to real scholarship; but Shaykh Al-Maraghi soon shattered my illusions:

'Dost thou see those "scholars" over there? 'He asked me. 'they read and repeat, read and repeat -and the students who listen to them learn only to read and repeat, generation after generation.'

'But, Shaykh Mustafa; I interposed, 'Al-Azhar is, after all, the central seat of Islamic learning, and the oldest university in the world! One encounters its name on nearly every page of Muslim cultural history. What about all the great thinkers, the theologians, historians, philosophers, mathematicians it has produced over the last ten centuries?'

'It stopped producing them several centuries ago,' he replied ruefully. 'Well, perhaps not quite; here and there an independent thinker has somehow managed to emerge from Al-Azhar even in recent times. But on the whole, Al-Azhar has lapsed into the sterility from which the whole Muslim world is suffering, and its old impetus is all but extinguished. Those ancient Islamic thinkers whom thou hast mentioned would never have dreamed that after so many centuries their thoughts, instead of being continued and developed, would only be repeated over and over again, as if they were ultimate and infallible truths. If there is to be any change for the better, thinking must be encouraged instead of the present thought-imitation...'

Shaykh Al-Maraghi's trenchant characterization of Al-Azhar helped me to realize one of the deepest causes of the cultural decay that stared one in the face everywhere in the Muslim world. Was not the scholastic petrifaction of this ancient university mirrored, in varying degrees, in the social sterility of the Muslim present? Was not the counterpart of this intellectual stagnation to be found in the passive, almost indolent, acceptance by so many Muslims of the unnecessary poverty in which they lived, of their mute toleration of the many social wrongs to which they were subjected?

And was it any wonder then, I asked myself, that, fortified by such tangible evidences of Muslim decay, so many erroneous views about Islam itself were prevalent throughout the West? These popular, Western views could be summarized thus: The downfall of the Muslims is mainly due to Islam which, far from being a religious ideology comparable to Christianity or Judaism, is a rather unholy mixture of desert fanaticism, gross sensuality. superstition and dumb fatalism that prevents its adherents from participating in mankind's advance toward higher social forms; instead of liberating the human spirit from the shackles of obscurantism, Islam rather tightens them; and, consequently, the sooner the Muslim peoples are freed from their subservience to Islamic beliefs and social practices and induced to adopt the Western way of life, the better for them and for the rest of the world...

My own observations had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What 1 saw in the pages of the Koran was not a 'crudely materialistic' world-view but, on the contrary, an intense God consciousness that expressed itself in a rational acceptance of all God-created nature: a harmonious side-by-side of intellect and sensual urge, spiritual need and social demand. It was obvious to me that the decline of the Muslims was not due to any shortcomings in Islam but rather to their own failure to live up to it.

For, indeed, it was Islam that had carried the early Muslims to tremendous cultural heights by directing all their energies toward conscious thought as the only means to understanding the nature of God's creation and, thus, of His will. No demand had been made of them to believe in dogmas difficult or even impossible of intellectual comprehension; in fact, no dogma whatsoever was to be found in the Prophet's message: and, thus, the thirst after knowledge which distinguished early Muslim history had not been forced, as elsewhere in the world, to assert itself in a painful struggle against the traditional faith. On the contrary, it had stemmed exclusively from that faith. The Arabian Prophet had declared that Striving after knowledge is a most sacred duty for every Muslim man and woman: and his followers were led to understand that only by acquiring knowledge could they fully worship the Lord. When they pondered the Prophet's saying, God creates no disease without creating a cure for it as well, they realized that by searching for unknown cures they would contribute to a fulfilment of God's will on earth: and so medical research became invested with the holiness of a religious duty. They read the Koran verse, we create every living thing out of water -and in their endeavor to penetrate to the meaning of these words, and they began to study living organisms and the laws of their development: and thus they established the science of biology. The Koran pointed to the harmony of the stars and their movements as witnesses of their Creator's glory: and thereupon the sciences of astronomy and mathematics were taken up by the Muslims with a fervor which in other religions was reserved for prayer alone. The Copernican system, which established the earth's rotation around its axis and the revolution of the planets around the sun, was evolved in Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century (only to be met by the fury of the ecclesiastics, who read in it a contradiction of the literal teachings of the Bible): but the foundations of this system had actually been laid six hundred years earlier, in Muslim countries for already in the ninth and tenth centuries Muslim astronomers had reached the conclusion that the earth was globular and that it rotated around its axis, and had made accurate calculations of latitudes and longitudes; and many of them maintained -without ever being accused of heresy -that the earth rotated around the sun. And in the same way they took to chemistry and physics and physiology, and to all the other sciences in which the Muslim genius was to find its most lasting monument. In building that monument they did no more than follow the admonition of their Prophet that If anybody proceeds on his way in search of knowledge, God will make easy for him the way to Paradise,' that The scientist walks in the path of God; that The superiority of the learned over the mere pious is like the superiority of the moon when it is full over all other stars; and that The ink of the scholars is more precious than the blood of martyrs.

Throughout the whole creative period of Muslim history that is to say, during the first five centuries after the Prophet's time -science and learning had no greater champion than Muslim civilization and no home more secure than the lands in which Islam was supreme.

Social life was similarly affected by the teachings of the Koran. At a time when in Christian Europe an epidemic was regarded as a scourge of God to which man had but to submit meekly -at that time, and long before it, the Muslims followed the injunction of their Prophet which directed them to combat epidemics by segregating the infected towns and areas. And at a time when even the kings and nobles of Christendom regarded bathing as an almost indecent luxury, even the poorest of Muslim houses had at least one bathroom, while elaborate public baths were common in every Muslim city (in the ninth century, for instance, Cordoba had three hundred of them): and all this in response to the Prophet's teaching that Cleanliness is part of faith. A Muslim did not come into conflict with the claims of spiritual life if he took pleasure in the beautiful things of material life, for, according to the Prophet, God loves to see on His servants an evidence of His bounty.

In short, Islam gave a tremendous incentive to cultural achievements which constitute one of the proudest pages in the history of mankind; and it gave this incentive by saying yes to the intellect and No to obscurantism, Yes to action and No to quietism, Yes to life and No to asceticism. Little wonder, then, that as soon as it emerged beyond the confines of Arabia, Islam won new adherents by leaps and bounds. Born and nurtured in the world-contempt of Pauline and Augustinian Christianity, the populations of Syria and North Africa, and a little later of Visigothic Spain, saw themselves suddenly confronted with 'a teaching which denied the dogma of Original Sin and stressed the inborn dignity of earthly life: and so they rallied in ever-increasing numbers to the new creed that gave them to understand that man was God's vicar on earth. This, and not a legendary 'conversion at the point of the sword', was the explanation of Islam's amazing triumph in the glorious morning of its history.

It was not the Muslims that had made Islam great: it was Islam that had made the Muslims great. But as soon as their faith became habit and ceased to be a programme of life, to be consciously pursued, the creative impulse that underlay their civilization waned and gradually gave way to indolence, sterility and cultural decay.

The new insight I had gained, and the progress I was making in the Arabic language (I had arranged for a student of Al-Azhar to give me daily lessons), made me feel that now at last I possessed something like a key to the Muslim mind. No longer was I so certain that a European 'could never consciously grasp the total picture", as I had written in my book only a few months earlier; for now this Muslim world no longer seemed so entirely alien to Western associations. It occurred to me that if one was able to achieve a certain degree of detachment from his own past habits of thought and allow for the possibility that they might not be the only valid ones, the once so strange Muslim world might indeed become graspable...

But although I found much in Islam that appealed to my intellect as well as to my instincts, I did not consider it desirable for an intelligent man to conform all his thinking and his entire view of life to a system not devised by himself.

'Tell me, Shaykh Mustafa,' I asked my erudite friend AlMaraghi on one occasion, 'why should it be necessary to confine oneself to one particular teaching and one particular set of injunctions? Mightn't it be better to leave all ethical inspiration to one's inner voice?'

'What thou art really asking, my young brother, is why should there be any institutional religion. The answer is simple. Only very few people -only prophets -are really able to understand the inner voice that speaks in them. Most of us are trammeled by our personal interests and desires -and if everyone were to follow only what his own heart dictates, we would have complete moral chaos and could never agree on any mode of behavior.

Thou couldst ask, of course, whether there are no exceptions to the general rule -enlightened people who feel they have no need to be "guided" in what they consider to be right or wrong; but then, I ask thee, would not many, very many people claim that exceptional right for themselves? And what would be the result?'

***

 

When we make camp for the night, Zayd starts to bake our bread. We eat it with clarified butter and dates. There is no bread more delicious than this.

Mansur's hunger, like Zayd's and mine, has been satisfied, but his curiosity has not. As we lie around the fire, he continues to ply me with questions about how I finally became a Muslim and while I try to explain it to him, it strikes me, with something like astonishment, how difficult it is to put into words my long way to Islam.

'-for, O Mansur, Islam came over me like a robber who enters a house by night, stealthily, without noise or much ado: only that, unlike a robber, it entered to remain for good. But it took me years to discover that I was to be a Muslim...'

Thinking back to those days of my second Middle East journey -when Islam began to occupy my mind in all earnest -it seems to me that even then I was conscious of pursuing a journey of discovery. Every day new impressions broke over me; every day new questions arose from within and new answers came from without. They awakened an echo of something that had been hidden somewhere in the background of my mind; and as I progressed in my knowledge of Islam I felt, time and time again, that a truth I had always known, without being aware of it, was gradually being uncovered and, as it were, confirmed.

***

With every day of those two years in Iran and Afghanistan the certainty grew in me that I was approaching some final answer.

'For it so happened, Mansur that the understanding of how Muslims lived brought me daily closer to a better understanding of lslam. Islam was always uppermost in my mind...'

'It is time for the isha prayer,' says Zayd, glancing at the night sky. We line up for the last prayer of the day, all three of us facing toward Mecca: Zayd and Mansur stand side by side and I in front of them, leading the congregational prayer (for the Prophet has described every assembly of two or more as a congregation).

I raise-my hands and begin, Allahu akbar -'God alone is Great' -and then recite, as Muslims always do, the opening sura of the Koran:

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Dispenser of Grace. All praise is due to God alone, Sustainer of the Universe,

The Most Gracious, the Dispenser of Grace, Lordofthe Day ofJudgment. Thee alone do we worship, And Thee alone do we beseech for help. Lead us the right way, the way of those upon whom is Thy favour, Not of those who earn Thy wrath, nor of those who go astray.

And I follow with the hundred and twelfth sura:

In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Dispenser of Grace, Say: God is One, The Self-Sufficient on Whom everything depends. He begets not, nor is He begotten, And there is naught that could be likened unto Him.

There are few things, if any, which bring men so close to one another as praying together. This, I believe, is true of every religion, but particularly so of Islam, which rests on the belief that no intermediary is necessary, or indeed possible, between man and God. The absence of all priesthood, clergy, and even of an organized 'church' makes every Muslim feel that he is truly sharing in, and not merely attending, a common act of worship when he prays in congregation. Since there are no sacraments in Islam, every adult and sane Muslim may perform any religious function whatsoever, whether it be leading a congregation in prayer, performing a marriage ceremony or conducting a burial service. None need be 'ordained' for the service of God: the religious teachers and leaders of the Muslim community are simple men who enjoy a reputation (sometimes deserved and sometimes not) for erudition in theology and religious law.

***

It is afternoon. I am sitting with a friend in his palm garden just outside the southern gate of Medina. The multitude of palm trunks in the orchard weaves a grey-green twilight into its background, making it appear endless. The trees are still young and low; sunlight dances over their trunks and the pointed arches of their fronds. Their green is somewhat dusty because of the sand-storms which occur almost daily at this time of year. Only the thick carpet of Lucerne under the palms is of a brilliant, faultless green.

Not far in front of me rise the city walls, old, grey, built of stone and mud bricks, with bastions jutting forward here and there. From behind the wall tower the luxuriant palms of another garden in the interior of the city, and houses with weather browned window shutters and enclosed balconies; some of them have been built into the city wall and have become part of it. In the distance I can see the five minarets of the Prophet's Mosque, high and tender like the voices of flutes, the great green dome which vaults over and conceals the little house of the Prophet his home while he lived and his grave after he died -and still farther, beyond the city, the naked, rocky range of Mount Uhud: a brown-red backdrop for the white minarets of the Holy Mosque, the crowns of the palms and the many houses of the town.

Even after thirteen centuries his spiritual presence is almost as alive here as it was then. It was only because of him that the scattered group of villages once called Yathrib became a city and has been loved by all Muslims down to this day as no city anywhere else in the world has ever been loved. It has not even a name of its own: for more than thirteen hundred years it has been called Madinat an-Nabi, 'the City of the Prophet'. For more than thirteen hundred years, so much love has converged here that all shapes and movements have acquired a kind of family resemblance, and all differences of appearance find a tonal transition into a common harmony.

This is the happiness one always feels here- this unifying harmony. Although life in Medina today has only a formal, distant relationship with what the Prophet aimed at; although the spiritual awareness of Islam has been cheapened here, as in many other parts of the Muslim world: an indescribable emotional link with its great spiritual past has remained alive. Never has any city been so loved for the sake of one single personality; never has any man, dead for over thirteen hundred years, been loved so personally, and by so many, as he who lies buried beneath the great green dome.

And yet he never claimed to be anything but a mortal man and never have Muslims attributed divinity to him, as so many followers of other Prophets have done after the Prophet's death. Indeed, the Koran itself abounds in statements which stress Muhammad's humanness: Muhammad is naught but a Prophet; all prophets have passed away before him; if he dies or is slain, will ye then turn back upon your heels? His utter insignificance before the majesty of God has thus been expressed the Koran: Say [O Muhammad]: 'I do not possess any power to grant you evil or good... I do not even possess any power to convey benefit or harm to myself, except as God may please; and had I known the Unknowable. I would have acquired much good, and no evil would ever have befallen me. I am nothing but a warner and the giver of glad tidings: O those who have faith in God...'

It was precisely because he was only human, because he lived like other men, enjoying the pleasures and suffering the ills of human existence, that those around him could so encompass him with their love.

This love has outlasted his death and lives on in the hearts of his followers like the leitmotif of a melody built up of many tones. It lives on in Medina. It speaks to you out of every stone of the ancient city. You can almost touch it with your hands: but you cannot capture it in words...

***

END OF THE ROAD

We leave medina late at night, following the 'eastern' route -the one the Prophet followed on his last pilgrimage to Mecca, a few months before his death. We ride through the rest of the night and through the approaching dawn. After a short stop for our morning prayer we proceed into the day, which is grey and cloudy. In the forenoon it begins to rain, and soon we are wet to our skins. Finally we espy a small beduin encampment far to our left and decide to take shelter in one of the black tents.

The camp is small and belongs to a group of Harb beduins, who receive us with a loud, 'May God give you life, O strangers, and be you welcome.' I spread my blanket over the mats of goat hair in the tent of the shaykh, whose wife -unveiled like most of the beduin women in this region -repeats her husband's gracious welcome. After my sleepless night, sleep overcomes me speedily under the drumming of the rain on the tent roof.

 

WE RIDE, AND EVERY STEP of the dromedaries brings us nearer to the end of our road. We ride for days through the sunlit steppe; we sleep at night under the stars and awake in the coolness of dawn; and slowly I approach the end of my road.

There has never been any other road for me; although I did not know it for many years, Mecca has always been my goal. It called to me, long before my mind became aware of it, with a powerful voice: 'My Kingdom is in this world as well as in the world to come: My Kingdom waits for man's body as well as for his extends over all that he thinks and feels and does his commerce as well as his prayer, his bed chamber as well as his politics; My Kingdom knows neither end nor limits.' And when, over a number of years, all this became clear to me, I knew where I belonged: I knew that the brotherhood of Islam had been waiting for me ever since I was born; and I embraced Islam. The desire of my early youth, to belong to a definite orbit of ideas, to be part of a community of brethren, had at last been fulfilled.

Strangely enough -but perhaps not so strange if one considers what Islam stands for -my very first experience as a Muslim among Muslims was one of brotherhood...

In the first days of January 1927, I set out again, this time accompanied by Elsa and her little son, for the Middle East; and this time, I sensed, it would be for good.

Never before, I reflected, have the worlds of Islam and the West come so close to one another as today. This closeness is a struggle, visible and invisible. Under the impact of Western cultural influences, the souls of many Muslim men and women are slowly shriveling. They are letting themselves be led away from their erstwhile belief that an improvement of living standards should be but a means to improving man's spiritual perceptions; they are falling into the same idolatry of 'progress' into which the Western world fell after it reduced religion to a mere melodious tinkling somewhere in the background of happening; and are thereby growing smaller in stature, not greater: for all cultural imitation, opposed as it is to creativeness, is bound to make a people small ...

Not that the Muslims could not learn much from the West, especially in the fields of science and technology. But, then, acquisition of scientific notions and methods is not really 'imitation': and certainly not in the case of a people whose faith commands them to search for knowledge wherever it is to be found. Science is neither Western nor Eastern, for all scientific discoveries are only links in an unending chain of intellectual endeavor which embraces mankind as a whole. Every scientist builds on the foundations supplied by his predecessors, be they of his own nation or of another; and this process of building, correcting and improving goes on and on, from man to man, from age to age, from civilization to civilization: so that the scientific achievements of a particular age or civilization can never be said to 'belong' to that age or civilization. At various times one nation, more vigorous than others, is able to contribute more to the general fund of knowledge; but in the long run the process is shared, and legitimately so, by all. There was a time when the civilization of the Muslims was more vigorous than the civilization of Europe. It transmitted to Europe many technological inventions of a revolutionary nature, and more than that: the very principles of that 'scientific method' on which modern science and civilization are built. Nevertheless, Jabir ibn Hayyan's fundamental discoveries in chemistry did not make chemistry an 'Arabian' science; nor can algebra and trigonometry be described as 'Muslim' sciences, although the one was evolved by Al-Khwarizmi and the other by Al-Battani, both of whom were Muslims: just as one cannot speak of an 'English' Theory of Gravity, although the man who formulated it was an Englishman. All such achievements are the common property of the human race. If, therefore, the Muslims adopt, as adopt they must, modern methods in science and technology, they will do no more than follow the evolutionary instinct which causes men to avail themselves of other men's experiences. But if they adopt -as there is no need for them to do -Western forms of life, Western manners and customs and social concepts, they will not gain thereby: for what the West can give them in this respect will not be superior to what their own culture has given them and to what their own faith points the way.

If the Muslims keep their heads cool and accept progress as a means and not as an end in itself, they may not only retain their own inner freedom but also, perhaps, pass on to Western man the lost secret of life's sweetness...

The End

 

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