"The Road to Makkah" by Muhammad Asad

Author: Muhammad Asad
Title: "The Road to Makkah" (380 p.)
Publisher: Dar Al-Andalus, 1985
380 pages

“A very rare and powerful book, raised completely above the ordinary by its candor and intelligence… And what we gain is a cultural reorientation which should permanently affect our view of the world” (New York Post).

“… a Muslim’s acquiescence to fate relates to the past and not to the future: it is not a refusal to act, to hope and to improve, but a refusal to consider past reality as anything but an act of God” (The Road to Makkah 159).

Those familiar with the history of Pakistan will easily recognize the name of Muhammad Asad – an extraordinary man, who worked together with the great poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal on the idea of Pakistan, when it was no more than a visionary dream, and implemented the ideals of Islam in the newly formed Muslim state.

In 1947, Muhammad Asad was called by the government of Pakistan to organize and direct a Department of Islamic Reconstruction. After two years, he was transferred to the Pakistan Foreign Service and appointed Head of the Middle East Division in the Foreign Ministry. Later, Asad also served in Pakistan’s Mission to the United Nations in New York.

It was during Asad’s service in New York that his European and American friends began wondering “how a man of Western birth and upbringing could have so fully, and apparently with no mental reservation whatsoever, identified himself with the Muslim world; how had it been possible for him to exchange his Western cultural heritage for that of Islam, and what it was that had made him accept a religious and social ideology, which – they seemed to take for granted – was vastly inferior to all European concepts” (2).

Prompted by an American friend, Asad, first in a joke but later seriously, took up the task to set down the story of his life. In 1952, he resigned from the Pakistan Foreign Service with the goal to write a book that would “lift the heavy veil, which separates Islam and its culture from the Occidental mind … [and] contribute to a mutual understanding between the Islamic and Western worlds” (8). Asad realized that his unique position of a Muslim with western origin gave him a great opportunity “to speak the intellectual languages of both Islam and the West” (8). Thus, this book was born.

The Road to Makkah covers the years of Asad’s life, before he left for India to join Iqbal. He starts out with the early years of his childhood in a Polish city of Lwow, where he spent long hours studying the Jewish scriptures for reinforcing his family heritage. Further, Asad covers the exciting years he spent as a foreign correspondent for Continental newspapers – the time of extensive travels throughout the Middle East. After becoming Muslim in 1926, Asad lived for nearly six years in Arabia, enjoying special favors and close friendship of King Ibn Saud.

The narrative of the book is built in two plains, the primary being Asad’s last desert journey to Makkah in the late summer of 1932 and the secondary – flashbacks to the different stages of his earlier life that led him to finding his spiritual path to Allah – his very own ‘road to Makkah.’

Scenic beauty of Arabia, deeply thoughtful conversations on human nature and principles of Islam, informed comments on the Near Eastern affairs, the inside stories from the King Ibn Saud’s household, a brilliant autobiography and a captivating reading – in The Road to Makkah, you have it all!

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