Leopold Weiss (1900-1992)

"It was not any particular teaching that attracted me [to Islam], but the whole wonderful, inexplicably coherent structure of moral teaching and practical life programme. I could not say, even now, which aspect of it appeals to me more than any other. Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other; nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking, with the result of an absolute balance and solid composure."

Leopold Weiss, who later became famous in the Muslim world as Muhammad Asad, was born in a Jewish family in 1900 in what is now part of Germany. He was the grandson of a Jewish rabbi. His father, however, was not as enthusiastic about a religious career and instead became a lawyer. After the First World War, Leopold came to Jerusalem at the age of twenty and soon started his career in journalism as a special correspondent in the Middle East for German and Swiss newspapers. That is when he came into contact with the Arabs whom he liked and became very interested about their approach to life. This made him embark on a serious study about Muslims and their religious

teachings. The more he studied Islam, the more he realized how concrete and practical the Islamic teachings were and how largely Muslims had abandoned those teachings. This question of why Muslims had forsaken their religious teachings eventually overshadowed all of his

Europe’s real deity was Comfort You choose to lead me around in a circle They won’t be in a majority after few years A community without walls An intellectual “boy” Why Institutional Religion? You are a Muslim – only you do not know it You are obsessed by greed for more & more Dream Umar Mukhtar - The Lion of the Desert Water becomes foul if it stands motionless

intellectual quest in Islam and, although a non-Muslim who was still in his early twenties, he felt as if he needed to defend Islam from the “negligence and indolence” of the Muslims.