An Intellectual “Boy”

"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 ... 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."

Soon after his Syrian journey, Weiss returned to Berlin. There he went to the office of Frankfurter Zeitung, the newspaper to which he had been writing for the past one year, in order to meet with its editor-in-chief, Dr. Heinrich Simon, a man of international reputation. When Dr. Simon saw him, he was startled –

When I came in, he looked at me for a moment in speechless astonishment, almost forgetting to get up from his chair; but soon he regained his composure, rose and shook hands with me: “Sit down, sit down. I have been expecting you.”

But he continued to stare at me in silence until I began to feel uncomfortable.

“Is there anything wrong, Dr. Simon?”

“No, no, nothing is wrong – or, rather, everything is wrong …” And then he laughed and went on: “I somehow had expected to meet a man of middle age with gold-rimmed spectacles – and now I find a boy … oh, I beg your pardon; how old are you, anyway?”

I suddenly recalled the jovial Dutch merchant in Cairo who had asked me the same question the year before; and I burst out laughing:

“I am over twenty-three, sir – nearly twenty-four.” And then I added: “Do you find it too young for the Frankfurter Zeitung?”

“No …” replied Simon slowly, “not for the Frankfurter Zeitung, but for your articles.”

After staying in Berlin for some months, Weiss left again for the Near East. By then his interest to learn about Islam grew, and so he went to Egypt and met Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi, one of the prominent scholars of that time who later became the rector of Al-Azher University.