“You are obsessed by greed for more and more
Until you go down to your graves”

"In the arrogance of their blindness, the people of the West are convinced that it is their civilization that will bring light and happiness to the world … In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they thought of spreading the gospel of Christianity all over the world; but now that their religious ardour has cooled so much that they consider religion no more than soothing background music – allowed to accompany, but not to influence, ‘real’ life – they have begun to spread instead the materialistic gospel of the ‘Western way of life’: the belief that all human problems can be solved in factories, laboratories and on the desks of statisticians."

It was 1926, and Weiss was back to Berlin after his second long journey in the Muslim lands. After years of inflation, there was now prosperity everywhere in central Europe. At home after long travels, he started studying the Qur’an in translation because his Arabic at that time was still not good enough. He and Elsa would often read the Qur’an together and discuss its ideas, and Elsa also began to be impressed by the inner cohesion between the Qur’an’s moral teachings and practical life programme. Then an extra ordinary incident happened.

One day he and his wife Elsa were traveling by underground train in Berlin when he saw a strange phenomenon –

It was an upper-class compartment. My eye fell casually on a well-dressed man opposite me, apparently a well-to-do businessman, with a beautiful case on his knees and a large diamond ring on his hand. I thought idly how well the portly figure of this man fitted into picture of prosperity which one encountered everywhere in central Europe in those days: a prosperity the more prominent as it had come after years of inflation, when all economic life had been topsy-turvy and shabbiness of appearance the rule. Most of the people were now well dressed and well fed, and the man opposite me was therefore no exception. But when I looked at his face, I did not seem to be looking at a happy face. He ap­peared to be worried: and not merely worried but acutely un­happy, with eyes staring vacantly ahead and the corners of his mouth drawn in as if in pain — but not in bodily pain. Not want­ing to be rude, I turned my eyes away and saw next to him a lady of some elegance. She also had a strangely unhappy expression on her face, as if contemplating or experiencing something that caused her pain; nevertheless, her mouth was fixed in the stiff semblance of a smile which, I was certain, must have been habit­ual. And then I began to look around at all the other faces in the compartment — faces belonging without exception to well-dressed, well-fed people: and in almost every one of them I could discern an expression of hidden suffering, so hidden that the owner of the face seemed to be quite unaware of it.

This was indeed strange. I had never before seen so many un­happy faces around me: or was it perhaps that I had never before looked for what was now so loudly speaking in them? The impression was so strong that I mentioned it to Elsa; and she too began to look around her with the careful eyes of a painter ac­customed to study human features. Then she turned to me, astonished, and said: “You are right. They all look as though they were suffering torments of hell... I wonder, do they know themselves what is going on in them?”

I knew that they did not — for otherwise they could not go on wasting their lives as they did, without any faith in binding truths, without any goal beyond the desire to raise their own “standard of living”, without any hopes other than having more material amenities, more gadgets, and perhaps more power.

When we returned home, I happened to glance at my desk on which lay open a copy of the Koran I had been reading earlier. Mechanically, I picked the book up to put it away, but just as I was about to close it, my eye fell on the open page before me, and I read:

You are obsessed by greed for more and more
Until you go down to your graves.
Nay, but you will come to know!
Nay, but you will come to know!
Nay, if you but knew it with the knowledge of certainty,
You would indeed see the hell you are in.
In time, indeed, you shall see it with the eye of certainty:
And on that Day you will be asked
What you have done with the boon of life. [Qur'an: 102]

For a moment I was speechless. I think the book shook in my hands. Then I handed it to Elsa. “Read this. Is it not an answer to what we saw in the subway?”

It was an answer: an answer so decisive that all doubt was suddenly at an end. I knew now, beyond any doubt, that it was a God-inspired book I was holding in my hand: for although it had been placed before man over thirteen centuries ago, it clearly anticipated something that could have become true only in this complicated, mechanized, phantom-ridden age of ours.

At all times people had known greed: but at no time before this had greed outgrown a mere eagerness to acquire things and become an obsession that blurred the sight of everything else: an irresistible craving to get, to do, to contrive more and more - more today than yesterday, and more tomorrow than today: a demon riding on the necks of men and whipping their hearts forward toward goals that tauntingly glitter in the distance but dissolve into contemptible nothingness as soon as they are reached, always holding out the promise of new goals ahead — goals still more brilliant, more tempting as long as they lie on the horizon, and bound to wither into further nothingness as soon as they come within grasp: and that hunger, that insatiable hunger for ever new goals gnawing at man’s soul: Nay, if you but knew it you would see the hell you are in ...

This, I saw, was not the mere human wisdom of a man of a distant past in distant Arabia. However wise he may have been, such a man could not by himself have foreseen the torment so peculiar to this twentieth century. Out of the Koran spoke a voice greater than the voice of Muhammad ...

Thus Leopold Weiss became a Muslim at the age of mere twenty-six. Once convinced of the Truth, he did not hesitate but accepted it the very next day. This is a significant step, especially when one keeps in mind the fact that there are many who, although convinced that Islam is the religion of Truth, choose not to leave the faith of their forefathers or their current ways of life.

Elsa, Weiss’ first wife, became Muslim a few weeks later. Shortly afterwards, Weiss, now known as Muhammad Asad, left Europe for the third time. This time Elsa was with him and they went to perform the Hajj (pilgrimage) in Mecca. She fell ill before the Hajj, and after performing the Hajj she died. Unlike her husband, she is virtually unknown to the Muslims and passed away before she could have been known in the intellectual world. A silent figure she may be, but light always exposes objects even if they are in the dark. What, therefore, becomes apparent to a student of history is that she was a seeker of Truth; that together with her husband she spent days and nights studying the Qur’an; that she humbled herself in front of God Almighty as soon as His message became apparent to her; that soon afterwards she rushed to the ‘House of God’ and circumvented it saying “My Lord! I am present to your service!”; and finally and most importantly, she met her Lord in the state of submission to Him. That is the ultimate success a human being can have.