“They won’t be in a majority after a few years”

"My own observation had by now convinced me that the mind of the average Westerner held an utterly distorted image of Islam. What I 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."

In Jerusalem, he saw how systematically a land was being stolen from its native people who had lived there for thousands of years – the Palestinians.

Although a Jew – and he did not have the slightest idea then that one day he would become a Muslim – he had a strong objection to Zionism from the very outset. He thought that it was immoral that immigrants, assisted by a Great Power, would come from other parts of the world and settle in Palestine with the intention of attaining the majority and disposing its native people who had been living there for thousands of years. “In the Balfour Declaration of 1917, I saw a cruel political maneuver designed to foster the old principle, common to all colonial powers, of ‘divide and rule’”.

Being a Jew, he came in close contact with some of the Zionist leaders. One of them was Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the undisputed leader of the Zionist movement. He met him in the house of one of his Jewish friends and had the following conversation with him:

He was talking of the financial difficulties which were besetting the dream of a Jewish National Home, and the insufficient response to this dream among people abroad; and I had the disturbing impression that even he, like most of the other Zionists, was inclined to transfer the moral responsibility for all that was happening in Palestine to the ‘outside world.’ This impelled me to break through the deferential hush with which all the other people present were listening to him, and to ask:

“What about the Arabs?”

I must have committed a faux pas by thus bringing a jarring note into the conversation, for Dr. Weizmann turned his face slowly toward me, put down the cup he had been holding in his hand, and repeated my question:

“What about the Arabs ...?”

“Well – how can you ever hope to make Palestine your homeland in the face of the vehement opposition of the Arabs who, after all, are in the majority of the country?”

The Zionist leader shrugged his shoulders and answered drily: “We expect they won’t be in a majority after a few years.”

“Perhaps so. You have been dealing with this problem for years and must know the situation better than I do. But quite apart from the political difficulties which Arab opposition may or may not put in your way – does not moral aspect of the question ever bother you? Don’t you think that is wrong on your part to displace the people who have always lived in this country?”

“But it is our country,” replied Dr. Weizmann, raising his eyebrows. “We are doing no more than taking back what we have wrongly been deprived of.”

“But you have been away from Palestine for nearly two thousand years! Before that you had ruled this country, and hardly ever the whole of it, for less than five hundred years. Don’t you think that the Arabs could, with equal justification, demand Spain for themselves – for, after all, they held sway in Spain for nearly seven hundred years and lost it entirely only five hundred years ago?”

Dr. Weizmann had visibly become impatient: “Nonsense. The Arabs had only conquered Spain; it had never been their original homeland, and so it was only right that in the end they were driven out by the Spaniards.”

“Forgive me,” I retorted, “but it seems to me that there is some historical oversight here. After all, the Hebrews also came as conquerors to Palestine. Long before them were many other Semitic and non-Semitic tribes settled here – the Amorites, the Edomites, the Philistines, the Moabites, the Hitties. Those tribes continued living here even in the days of kingdoms of Israel and Judah. They continued living here after the Romans drove our ancestors away. They are living here today. The Arabs who settled in Syria and Palestine after their conquest in seventh century were always only a small minority of the population; the rest of what we describe today as Palestinians or Syrian “Arabs” are in reality only the Arabianized, original inhabitants of the country. Some of them became Muslims in the course of centuries, others remained Christians; the Muslims naturally inter-married with their co-religionists from Arabia. But can you deny that the bulk of those people in Palestine, who speak Arabic, whether Muslims or Christians, are direct-line descendents of the original inhabitants; original in the sense of having lived in this country centuries before the Hebrews came to it?”

Dr. Weizmann smiled politely at my outburst and turned the conversation to other topics.

It was at that time, in 1922, that he became a special correspondent of the Berlin based Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the most outstanding and widely circulated newspaper of Europe. Later on, his articles were to be syndicated by three other prominent newspapers of Europe: the Neue Zurcher Zeitung of Zurich, the Telegraph of Amsterdam, and the Kolnische Zeitung of Cologne.

Not all Jews were Zionists, for he met some who were opposed to Zionism. One of those was Dr. Jacob de Haan, who later became his friend. Dr. de Haan told him once -

It was not without a purpose that God made us lose our land and dispersed us; but the Zionists do not want to admit this to themselves. They suffer from the same spiritual blindness that caused our downfall. The two thousand years of Jewish exile and unhappiness have taught them nothing. Instead of making an attempt to understand the innermost causes of our unhappiness, they now try to circumvent it, as it were, by building a “national home” on foundations provided by Western power politics; and in the process of building a national home, they are committing the crime of depriving another people of its home.

His second experience in Jerusalem was his coming in contact with the life style of the Arabs, a way of life that was simple and full of inner peace.

While coming to Jerusalem, he traveled by train from Egypt across the Sinai desert. There was an Arab Bedouin sharing his compartment who sat on the opposite row of seats. The train stopped at a certain station. There were boys running across the station platform offering food, eggs, breads, etc for sale. The Bedouin bought a piece of cake through the window. As he turned around to sit down, his eyes fell on Weiss who was sitting on the opposite row. Immediately, he broke the cake in half and offered one to Weiss. And as he extended his hand, he said tafaddal – “grant me the favour”.

Weiss did not know at that time what the word tafaddal meant, but this small incident was his first experience of Arab hospitality. But it was more than that – it was a realization of a people whose approach to life was very different than he was accustomed with as a European. He soon recognized in them the “organic coherence of the mind and the senses” that was lost forever in Europe. “In the Arabs I began to find something I had always unwittingly been looking for: an emotional lightness of approach to all questions of life – a supreme common sense of feeling, if one might call it so.”

He was soon to leave Palestine and travel through many Muslim countries in the Middle East and central Asia to know more about the life of Muslims, but not necessarily of their religion.