Muhammad Asad
Galicia
1927
Muhammad Asad was a traveler of large spiritual energy whose adventures, books, and diplomatic service spanned seventy years. Born in Lwów in 1900, a descendant of rabbis and lawyers, Asad studied history and philosophy at University of Vienna, then joined a circle of artists and intellectuals at Café des Westens in Berlin. In 1921, he left a desk job with the United Telegraph news agency and went to Jerusalem. There, as special correspondent to the Frankfurter Zeitung, he sent home popular despatches later published as a book, The Unromanticized East. After extensive travels in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Asia, Asad returned to Germany in 1926. He was twenty-six, a well-known journalist.
The pages excerpted here, from his 1954 memoir, The Road to Mecca, touch on three pivotal events after his return: his marriage to a German painter, Elsa Weiss, their conversion to Islam in Berlin, and their subsequent pilgrimage to Mecca. As the reader will see, it was in the Hijaz that his first wife’s untimely death changed Asad’s trajectory forever. He was not to return to the West for many years.
The Road to Mecca is full of good travel writing, yet this is not a travel book at all. It is a conversion narrative, constructed to convey the largely psychological process by which a European Jew of some refinement gradually and wholeheartedly transferred his allegiance to Islam and to Muslim culture. As its title suggests, the book takes the Hajj as the emblem of this journey. Although its evocations verge on the rhetorical at times, the book as a whole succeeds in ways that a handful of excerpts may not convey. It is a favorite text throughout the Muslim world.
Asad’s growing disaffection with the West was a powerful catalyst in his conversion. He was a seeker, a student of Freud with a strong, modernist urge to make life cohere rationally and spiritually. Islam offered an ideological center and a compelling reason to travel, too. It also provided an alternative to the totalitarianism and increased anti-Semitism then sweeping Europe. Arabia in particular appealed to Asad, and he appealed to Arabians. Ibn Saʿud himself befriended him. No doubt the King saw utility in a man who spoke Arabic and the languages of Europe, one with an open channel to the journals of the West, and Asad was clearly proud to know the King. Later he wrote occasional articles about him for the German press, and once he went on a secret Saudi mission to Kuwait, but his real value to Ibn Saʿud appears to have been as confidant. As with Philby (and many others) later, we see here a remarkable regent surrounded by lesser intellects, reaching out from his isolation to passing strangers. If Asad had political value to the King, it remains a secret.
Asad stayed in Arabia for six years, traveling in every corner of the kingdom, indulging his passion for the desert. From there, he continued east. The notion of the Muslim world as a vast, intercommunicating zone, with Mecca as a major crossroads, did not die out in the fourteenth century. Throughout Asad’s pages, travel and professional life are linked in ways that recall the career of Ibn Battuta. While en route to China, Asad stopped for a time in India. There, by an accident of his Austrian citizenship, he was interred through World War II in a prisoner of war camp as an involuntary guest of the Indian government. Following the war, he was invited by the philosopher Muhammad Iqbal to help lay the groundwork for a Pakistani nation. After Pakistan’s independence in 1947, he went on to serve the new government as head of the Middle East Division. He married again in 1952, to Pola Asad of Boston, who became instrumental in helping him to write and publish many works. Reflections on all these experiences are contained in The Road to Mecca, written in English and published in 1954.
In addition to autobiography, Asad wrote books on the principles of Islamic government and Muslim law. His views were drawn from a sound knowledge of tradition refreshingly unencumbered by dogma. He became an advocate of Muslim women’s rights (at his insistence, Pakistan’s constitution allows for the election of a woman as prime minister), and in his essays on the Sharia legal system he consistently argued for mercy and understanding over cold justice. In the early 1980s, his disillusionment with intolerant extremists, and with the spreading effects of the Iranian revolution in particular, forced him to move, first to Portugal, then to Spain, where Asad lived in self-exile from the Muslim world. Muhammad Asad, born Leopold Weiss, died February 22, 1992. He is buried in the Muslim cemetery in Granada.
from The Road to Mecca by Muhammad Asad
THE STORY OF A STORY The story I am going to tell in this book is not the autobiography of a man conspicuous for his role in public affairs; it is not a narrative of adventure—for although many strange adventures have come my way, they were never more than an accompaniment to what was happening within me; it is not even the story of a deliberate search for faith— for that faith came upon me, over the years, without any endeavour on my part to find it. My story is simply the story of a European’s discovery of Islam and of his integration within the Muslim community.
I had never thought of writing it, for it had not occurred to me that my life might be of particular interest to anyone except myself. But when, after an absence of twenty-five years from the West, I came to Paris and then to New York in the beginning of 1952, I was forced to alter this view. Serving as Pakistan’s Minister Plenipotentiary to the United Nations, I was naturally in the public eye and encountered a great deal of curiosity among my European and American friends and acquaintances. At first they assumed that mine was the case of a European “expert” employed by an Eastern government for a specific purpose, and that I had conveniently adapted myself to the ways of the nation which I was serving; but when my activities at the United Nations made it obvious that I identified myself not merely “functionally” but also emotionally and intellectually with the political and cultural aims of the Muslim world in general, they became somewhat perplexed. More and more people began to question me about my past experiences. They came to know that very early in my life I had started my career as a foreign correspondent for Continental newspapers and, after several years of extensive travels throughout the Middle East, had become a Muslim in 1926; that after my conversion to Islam I lived for nearly six years in Arabia and enjoyed the friendship of King Ibn Saʿud; that after leaving Arabia, I went to India and there met the great Muslim poet-philosopher and spiritual father of the Pakistan idea, Muhammad Iqbal. It was he who soon persuaded me to give up my plans of travelling to Eastern Turkistan, China, and Indonesia and to remain in India to help elucidate the intellectual premises of the future Islamic state which was then hardly more than a dream in Iqbal’s visionary mind. To me, as to Iqbal, this dream represented a way, indeed the only way, to a revival of all the dormant hopes of Islam, the creation of a political entity of people bound together not by common descent but by their common adherence to an ideology. For years I devoted myself to this ideal, studying, writing, and lecturing, and in time gained something of a reputation as an interpreter of Islamic law and culture. When Pakistan was established in 1947, I was called upon by its government to organize and direct a Department of Islamic Reconstruction, which was to elaborate the ideological, Islamic concepts of statehood and community upon which the newly born political organization might draw. After two years of this extremely stimulating activity, I transferred to the Pakistan foreign service and was appointed Head of the Middle East Division in the Foreign Ministry, where I dedicated myself to strengthening the ties between Pakistan and the rest of the Muslim world; and in due course I found myself in Pakistan’s Mission to the United Nations at New York.
All this pointed to far more than a mere outward accommodation of a European to a Muslim community in which he happened to live: it rather indicated a conscious, wholehearted transference of allegiance from one cultural environment to another, entirely different one. And this appeared very strange to most of my Western friends. They could not quite picture to themselves how a man of Western birth and upbringing could have so fully, and apparently with no mental reservations whatever, identified himself with the Muslim world; how it had 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. . . .
RETURNING TO THE WEST. 1926 It was in 1926, toward the end of the winter, that I left Herat [Afghanistan], on the first stage of my long homeward journey, which was to take me by train from the Afghan border to Marv in Russian Turkistan, to Samarkand, Bukhara, and Tashkent, and thence across the Turkmen steppes to the Urals and Moscow.
My first (and most lasting) impression of Soviet Russia—at the railway station of Marv—was a huge, beautifully executed poster which depicted a young proletarian in blue overalls booting a ridiculous, white-bearded gentleman, clad in flowing robes, out of a cloud-filled sky. The Russian legend beneath the poster read: THUS HAVE THE WORKERS OF THE SOVIET UNION KICKED GOD OUT OF HIS HEAVEN! ISSUES BY THE BEZBOZHNIKI [Godless] ASSOCIATION OF THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS.
Such officially sanctioned antireligious propaganda obtruded itself everywhere one went; in public buildings, in the streets, and, preferably, in the vicinity of houses of worship. In Turkistan these were, naturally, for the most part mosques. While prayer congregations were not explicitly forbidden, the authorities did everything to deter people from attending them. I was often told, especially in Bukhara and Tashkent, that police spies would take down the name of every person who entered a mosque; copies of the Quran were being impounded and destroyed; and a favourite pastime of the young bezbozhniki was to throw heads of pigs into mosques, a truly charming custom.
It was with a feeling of relief that I crossed the Polish frontier after weeks of journeying through Asiatic and European Russia. I went straight to Frankfurt and made my appearance in the now familiar precincts of my newspaper. It did not take me long to find out that during my absence my name had become famous, and that I was now considered one of the most outstanding foreign correspondents of central Europe. Some of my articles—especially those dealing with the intricate religious psychology of the Iranians—had come to the attention of prominent Orientalist scholars and received a more than passing recognition. On the strength of this achievement, I was invited to deliver a series of lectures at the Academy of Geopolitics in Berlin—where I was told that it had never happened before that a man of my age (I was not yet twenty-six) had been accorded such a distinction. Other articles of more general interest had been reproduced, with the permission of the Frankfurter Zeitung, by many other newspapers; one article, I learned, had been reprinted nearly thirty times. All in all, my Iranian wanderings had been extremely fruitful . . .
BERLIN. 1926 It was at this time that I married Elsa. The two years I had been away from Europe had not weakened our love but rather strengthened it, and it was with a happiness I had never felt before that I brushed aside her apprehensions about the great difference in our ages.
“But how can you marry me?” she argued. “You are not yet twenty-six, and I am over forty. Think of it: when you will be thirty, I will be forty-five; and when you will be forty, I will be an old woman . . .”
I laughed: “What does it matter? I cannot imagine a future without you.”
And finally she gave in.
I did not exaggerate when I said that I could not imagine a future with-out Elsa. Her beauty and her instinctive grace made her so utterly attractive to me that I could not even look at any other woman; and her sensitive understanding of what I wanted of life illumined my own hopes and desires and made them more concrete, more graspable than my own thinking could ever have done.
On one occasion—it must have been about a week after we had been married—she remarked: “How strange that you, of all people, should depreciate mysticism in religion . . . You are a mystic yourself—a sensuous kind of mystic, reaching out with your fingertips toward the life around you, seeing an intricate, mystical pattern in everyday things—in many things that to other people appear so commonplace . . . But the moment you turn to religion, you are all brain. With most people it would be the other way around . . .”
But Elsa was not really puzzled. She knew what I was searching for when I spoke to her of Islam; and although she may not have felt the same urgency as I did, her love made her share my quest.
Often we would read the Quran together and discuss its ideas; and Elsa, like myself, became more and more impressed by the inner cohesion between its moral teaching and its practical guidance. According to the Quran, God did not call for blind subservience on the part of man but rather appealed to his intellect; he did not stand apart from man’s destiny but was nearer to you than the vein in your neck; he did not draw any dividing line between faith and social behaviour; and, what was perhaps most important, he did not start from the axiom that all life was burdened with a conflict between matter and spirit and that the way toward the Light demanded a freeing of the soul from the shackles of the flesh. Every form of life denial and self-mortification had been condemned by the Prophet in sayings like “Behold, asceticism is not for us” and “There is no world renunciation in Islam.” The human will to live was not only recognized as a positive, fruitful instinct but was endowed with the sanctity of an ethical postulate as well. Man was taught, in effect: you not only may utilize your life to the full, but you are obliged to do so.
An integrated image of Islam was now emerging with a finality, a decisiveness that sometimes astounded me. It was taking shape by a process that could almost be described as a kind of mental osmosis—that is, without any conscious effort on my part to piece together and “systematize” the many fragments of knowledge that had come my way during the past four years. I saw before me something like a perfect work of architecture, with all its elements harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other, with nothing superfluous and nothing lacking—a balance and composure which gave one the feeling that everything in the outlook and postulates of Islam was “in its proper place.” . . .
MEDINA. 1932 Darkness has fallen over the courtyard of the Prophet’s Mosque, broken through only by the oil lamps which are suspended on long chains between the pillars of the arcades. Shaykh Abdullah ibn Bulayhid sits with his head sunk low over his chest and his eyes closed. One who does not know him might think that he has fallen asleep; but I know that he has been listening to my narrative with deep absorption, trying to fit it into the pattern of his own wide experience of men and their hearts. After a long while he raises his head and opens his eyes:
“And then? And what didst thou do then?”
“The obvious thing, O Shaykh. I sought out a Muslim friend of mine, an Indian who was at that time head of the small Muslim community in Berlin, and told him that I wanted to embrace Islam. He stretched out his right hand toward me, and I placed mine in it and, in the presence of two witnesses, declared: ‘I bear witness that there is no God but God and that Muhammad is his Messenger.’216 A few weeks later my wife did the same.”
“And what did thy people say to that?”
“Well, they did not like it. When I informed my father that I had become a Muslim, he did not even answer my letter. Some months later my sister wrote, telling me that he considered me dead . . . Thereupon I sent him another letter, assuring him that my acceptance of Islam did not change anything in my attitude toward him or my love for him; that, on the contrary, Islam enjoined upon me to love and honor my parents above all other people . . . But this letter also remained unanswered.”
“Thy father must indeed be strongly attached to his religion . . .”
“No, O Shaykh, he is not; and that is the strangest part of the story. He considers me, I think, a renegade, not so much from his faith (for that has never held him strongly) as from the community in which he grew up and the culture to which he is attached.”
“And has thou never seen him since?”
“No. Very soon after my conversion, my wife and I left Europe; we could not bear to remain there any longer. And I have never gone back . . .”217
“LABAYK, ALLAHUMMA, LABAYK . . .” How many times have I heard this cry during my five pilgrimages to Mecca. I seem to hear it now. . . . It hums and throbs and pounds like the pounding of sea waves against the hull of a ship and like the throbbing of engines: I can hear the engines throb and feel the quiver of the ship’s planks under me and smell its smoke and oil and hear the cry “Labayk, Allahumma, labayk” as it sounded from hundreds of throats on the ship which bore me on my first pilgrimage . . . from Egypt to Arabia over the sea that is called the Red, and nobody knows why. For the water was grey as long as we sailed through the Gulf of Suez, enclosed on the right side by the mountains of the African continent and on the left by those of the Sinai Peninsula—both of them naked, rocky ranges without vegetation, moving with the progress of our voyage farther and farther apart into a hazy distance of misty grey which let the land be sensed rather than seen. And when, in the later afternoon, we glided into the open width of the Red Sea, it was blue like the Mediterranean under the strokes of a caressing wind.
There were only pilgrims on board, so many that the ship could hardly contain them. The shipping company, greedy for the profits of the short Hajj season, had literally filled it to the brim without caring for the comfort of the passengers. On the decks, in the cabins, in all passageways, on every staircase, in the dining rooms of the first and second class, in the holds which had been emptied for the purpose and equipped with temporary ladders: in every available space and corner human beings were painfully herded together. They were mostly pilgrims from Egypt and North Africa. In great humility, with only the goal of the voyage before their eyes, they bore uncomplainingly all that unnecessary hardship. How they crouched on the deck planks, in tight groups, men, women, and children, and with difficulty managed their household chores (for no food was provided by the company); how they always struggled to and fro for water with tin cans and canvas canteens, every movement a torture in this press of humanity; how they assembled five times a day around the water taps—of which there were too few for so many people—in order to perform their ablutions before prayer; how they suffered in the stifling air of the deep holds, two stories below the deck, where at other times only bales and cases of goods travelled: whoever saw this had to recognize the power of faith which was in these pilgrims. For they did not really seem to feel their suffering, so consumed were they with the thought of Mecca. They spoke only of their Hajj, and the emotion with which they looked toward the near future made their faces shine. The women often sang in chorus songs about the Holy City, and again and again came the refrain: “Labayk, Allahumma, labayk!”
At about noon of the second day the ship siren sounded: this was a sign that we had reached the latitude of Rabigh, a small port north of Jidda, where, in accordance with an old tradition, the male pilgrims coming from the north are supposed to put away their everyday clothes and don the ihram, the pilgrim’s garment. This consists of two unsewn pieces of white woollen or cotton cloth, of which one is wound around the waist and reaches below the knees, while the other is slung loosely around one shoulder, with the head remaining uncovered. The reason for this attire, which goes back to an injunction of the Prophet, is that during the Hajj, there should be no feeling of strangeness between the faithful who flock together from all the corners of the world to visit the House of God, no difference between races and nations, or between rich and poor or high and low, so that all may know that they are brethren, equal before God and man. And very soon there disappeared from our ship all the colourful clothing of the men. You could no longer see the red Tunisian tarbushes, the sumptuous burnooses of the Moroccans, or the gaudy jallabiyas of the Egyptian fellahin: everywhere around you there was only this humble white cloth, devoid of any adornment, draped over bodies which were now moving with greater dignity, visibly affected by this change to the state of pilgrimage. Because the ihram would expose too much of their bodies, women pilgrims keep to their usual garments; but as on our ship these were only black or white—the black gowns of the Egyptian and the white ones of the North African women—they did not bring any touch of color into the picture.
At dawn of the third day the ship dropped anchor before the coast of Arabia. Most of us stood at the railing and gazed toward the land that was slowly rising out of the mists of the morning.
On all sides one could see silhouettes of other pilgrim ships, and between them and the land pale-yellow and emerald-green streaks in the water: submarine coral reefs, part of that long, inhospitable chain which lies before the eastern shore of the Red Sea. Beyond them, toward the east, there was something like a hill, low and dusky; but when the sun rose behind it, it suddenly ceased to be a hill and became a town by the sea, climbing from its rim toward the centre, with higher and higher houses, a small delicate structure of rose and yellow-grey coral stone: the port town of Jidda. By and by you could discern the carved, latticed windows and the wooden screens of balconies, to which the humid air had in the course of years imparted a uniform grey-green colour. A minaret jutted up in the middle, white and straight like an uplifted finger.
Again the cry, “Labayk, Allahumma, labayk!” was raised—a joyful cry of self-surrender and enthusiasm that swept from the tense, white-garbed pilgrims on board over the water toward the land of their supreme hopes.
Their hopes, and mine: for to me the sight of the coast of Arabia was the climax of years of search. I looked at Elsa, my wife, who was my companion on that pilgrimage, and read the same feeling in her eyes . . .
And then we saw a host of white wings darting toward us from the mainland: Arabian coastal boats. With Latin sails they skimmed over the flat sea, softly and soundlessly winding their way through fords between invisible coral reefs—the first emissaries of Arabia, ready to receive us. As they glided closer and closer and, in the end, flocked together with swaying masts at the side of the ship, their sails folded one after another with a rush and a swishing and flapping as if a flight of giant herons had alighted for feeding, and out of the silence of a moment ago, there arose a screeching and shouting from their midst: it was the shouting of the boatmen who now jumped from boat to boat and stormed the ship’s ladder to get hold of the pilgrims’ baggage; and the pilgrims were so filled with excitement at the sight of the Holy Land that they allowed things to happen to them without defending themselves.
The boats were heavy and broad; the clumsiness of their hulls contrasted strangely with the beauty and slimness of their high masts and sails. It must have been in such a boat, or perhaps in a somewhat larger one of the same kind, that the bold seafarer Sindbad set out to run into unasked-for adventures and to land on an island which in truth—oh horror!—was the back of a whale . . . And in similar ships there sailed, long before Sindbad, the Phoenicians southward through this same Red Sea and on through the Arabian Sea, seeking spices and incense and the treasures of Ophir . . .
And now we, puny successors of those heroic voyages, sailed across the coral sea, skirting the undersea reefs in wide curves: pilgrims in white garments, stowed between cases and boxes and trunks and bundles, a dumb host trembling with expectation.
I, too, was full of expectation. But how could I foresee, as I sat in the bow of the boat, the hand of my wife in my hand, that the simple enterprise of a pilgrimage would so deeply, and so completely, change our lives? Again I am compelled to think of Sindbad. When he left the shores of his homeland, he—like myself—had no inkling of what the future would bring. He did not foresee, nor desire, all those strange adventures that were to befall him, but wanted only to trade and to gain money; while I wanted no more than to perform a pilgrimage: but when the things that were to happen to him and to me really happened, neither of us was ever again able to look upon the world with his old eyes.
True, nothing so fantastic ever came my way as the jinns and the enchanted maidens and the giant bird Roc that the sailor from Basra had to contend with: but, nonetheless, that first pilgrimage of mine was destined to cut deeper into my life than all his voyages together had done to him. For Elsa, death waited ahead; and neither of us had any premonition how near it was. And as to myself, I knew that I had left the West to live among the Muslims; but I did not know that I was leaving my entire past behind. Without any warning, my old world was coming to an end: the world of Western ideas and feelings, endeavors and imageries. A door was silently closing behind me, so silently that I was not aware of it; I thought it would be a journey like all the earlier journeys, when one wandered through foreign lands, always to return to one’s past: but the days were to be changed entirely, and with them the direction of all desire.
By that time I had already seen many countries of the East. I knew Iran and Egypt better than any country of Europe; Kabul had long since ceased to be strange; the bazaars of Damascus and Isfahan were familiar to me. And so I could not but feel, “How trivial,” when I walked for the first time through a bazaar in Jidda and saw only a loose mixture and formless repetition of what elsewhere in the East one could observe in far greater perfection. The bazaar was covered with planks and sackcloth as protection against the steaming heat; out of holes and cracks thin, tamed sun rays shone through and gilded the twilight. Open kitchens before which Negro boys were roasting small pieces of meat on spits over glowing charcoal; coffee shops with burnished brass utensils and settees made of palm fronds; meaningless shops full of European and Eastern junk. Everywhere sultriness and smells of fish and coral dust. Everywhere crowds of people—innumerable pilgrims in white and the colorful, worldly citizens of Jidda, in whose faces, clothes, and manners met all the countries of the Muslim world: perhaps a father from India, while the mother’s father—himself probably a mixture of Malay and Arab— may have married a grandmother who on her father’s side descended from Uzbeks and on her mother’s side possibly from Somalis: living traces of the centuries of pilgrimage and of the Islamic environment which knows no colour bar and no distinction between races. In addition to this indigenous and pilgrim-borne confusion, Jidda was in those days (1927) the only place in the Hijaz in which non-Muslims were allowed to reside. You could occasionally see shop signs in European writing and people in white tropical dress with sun helmets or hats on their heads; over the consulates fluttered foreign flags.
All this belonged, as it were, not yet so much to the mainland as to the sea: to the sounds and smells of the port, to the ships riding at anchor beyond the pale coral streaks, to the fishing boats with white triangular sails— to a world not much unlike that of the Mediterranean. The houses, though, were already a little different, open to the breeze with richly moulded façades, carved wooden window frames, and covered balconies, thinnest screens of wood that permitted the inmates to look out without hindrance into the open but prevented the passerby from seeing the interior; all this woodwork sat like grey-green lace on the walls of rose coral stone, delicate and extremely harmonious. This was no longer the Mediterranean and not yet quite Arabia; it was the coastal world of the Red Sea, which produces similar architecture on both its sides.
Arabia, however, announced itself already in the steely sky, the naked, rocky hills and sand dunes toward the east, and in that breath of greatness and that bare scarcity which are always so strangely intermingled in an Arabian landscape.
JIDDA TO MECCA. 1927 In the afternoon of the next day our caravan started on the road to Mecca, winding its way through crowds of pilgrims, Bedouins, camels with and without litters, riding camels, gaily caparisoned donkeys, toward the eastern gate of the town. Off and on motorcars passed us—Saudi Arabia’s earliest motorcars—loaded with pilgrims and noisy with their Klaxon horns. The camels seemed to sense that the new monsters were their enemies, for they shied every time one approached, frantically veering toward house walls and moving their long necks hither and thither, confused and helpless. A new time was threateningly dawning for these tall, patient animals, filling them with fear and apocalyptic forebodings.
After a while we left the white city walls behind and found ourselves all at once in the desert—in a wide plain, greyish-brown, desolate, dotted with thorny bushes and patches of steppe grass, with low, isolated hills growing out of it like islands in a sea, and hedged into the east by somewhat higher, rocky ranges, bluish-grey, jagged of outline, barren of all life. All over that forbidding plain there plodded caravans, many of them, in long processions— hundreds and thousands of camels—animal behind animal in single file, loaded with litters and pilgrims and baggage, sometimes disappearing behind hills and then reappearing. Gradually all their paths converged onto a single, sandy road, created by the tracks of similar caravans over long centuries.
In the silence of the desert, which was underlined rather than broken by the plopping of the camels’ feet, the occasional calls of the Bedouin drivers and the low-toned singing of a pilgrim here and there, I was suddenly overcome by an eerie sensation—so overwhelming a sensation that one might almost call it a vision: I saw myself on a bridge that spanned an invisible abyss: a bridge so long that the end from which I had come was already lost in a misty distance, while the other end had hardly begun to unveil itself to the eye. I stood in the middle: and my heart contracted with dread as I saw myself thus halfway between the two ends of the bridge—already too far from the one and not yet close enough to the other—and it seemed to me, for long seconds, that I would always have to remain thus between the two ends, always above the roaring abyss—when an Egyptian woman on the camel before mine suddenly sounded the ancient pilgrim’s cry, “Labayk, Allahumma, labayk!”—and my dream broke asunder.
From all sides you could hear people speaking and murmuring in many tongues. Sometimes a few pilgrims called out in chorus, “Labayk, Allahumma, labayk!”—or an Egyptian fellah woman sang a song in honor of the Prophet, whereupon another uttered a ghatrafa, that joyful cry of Arab women: a shrill, very high pitched trill which women raise on all festive occasions—like marriage, childbirth, circumcision, religious processions of all kinds, and, of course, pilgrimages. In the knightly Arabia of earlier times, when the daughters of chieftains used to ride to war with the men of their tribe in order to spur them on to greater bravery (for it was regarded as extreme dishonour to allow one of these maidens to be killed, or, still worse, to be captured by the enemy), the ghatrafa was often heard on a field of battle.
Most of the pilgrims rode in litters—two on each camel—and the rolling motion of these contraptions gradually made one dizzy and tortured the nerves, so unceasing was the pitching and rocking. One dozed exhausted for a few moments, was awakened by a sudden jolt, slept again, and awoke again. From time to time the camel drivers, who accompanied the caravan on foot, called to their animals. One or another of them occasionally chanted in rhythm with the long-drawn-out step of the camels.
Toward morning we reached Bahra, where the caravan stopped for the day; for the heat permitted travel only during the night.
This village—in reality nothing but a double line of shacks, coffee shops, a few huts of palm fronds, and a very small mosque—was the traditional halting place for caravans halfway between Jidda and Mecca. The landscape was the same as it had been all the way since we left the coast: a desert with isolated hills here and there and higher, blue mountains in the east which separated the coastal lowlands from the plateau of central Arabia. But now all this desert around us resembled a huge army camp with innumerable tents, camels, litters, bundles, a confusion of many tongues—Arabic, Hindustani, Malay, Persian, Somali, Turkish, Pashto, Amharic, and God knows how many more. This was a real gathering of nations; but as everyone was wearing the all-leveling ihram, the differences of origin were hardly noticeable and all the many races appeared almost like one.
The pilgrims were tired after the night march, but only very few among them knew how to utilize this time of rest; to most of them traveling must have been a very unusual enterprise, and to many it was the first journey of their lives—and such a journey, toward such a goal! They had to be restless; they had to move about; their hands had to search for something to do, even if it was no more than opening and retying their bags and bundles: otherwise one would have become lost to the world, would have entirely lost oneself in unearthly happiness as in a sea . . .
This seemed to have happened to the family in the tent next to mine, apparently pilgrims from a Bengal village. They hardly exchanged a word, sat cross-legged on the ground and stared fixedly toward the east, in the direction of Mecca, into the desert that was filled with shimmering heat. There was such a faraway peace in their faces that you felt they were already before the House of God, and almost in his presence. The men were of a remarkable beauty, lean, with shoulder-long hair and glossy black beards. One of them lay ill on a rug: by his side crouched two young women, like colourful little birds in their voluminous red-and-blue trousers and silverembroidered tunics, their thick black tresses hanging down their backs; the younger of the two had a thin gold ring in one nostril.
In the afternoon the sick man died. The women did not raise a lament as they so often do in Eastern countries: for this man had died on the pilgrimage, on sacred soil, and was thus blest. The men washed the corpse and wrapped it in the same white cloth which he had worn as his last garment. Thereafter one of them stood before the tent, cupped his hands to his mouth, and called out loudly the call to prayer: “God is the greatest, God is the greatest! There is no God but God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger! . . . Pray for the dead! May God have mercy upon you all!” And from all sides the ihram-clad men flocked together and lined up in rows behind an imam like soldiers of a great army. When the prayer was over, they dug a grave, an old man read a few passages from the Quran, and then they threw sand over the dead pilgrim, who lay on his side, his face turned toward Mecca.
MECCA Before sunrise on the second morning the sandy plain narrowed, the hills grew closer together; we passed through a gorge and saw in the pale light of dawn the first buildings of Mecca; then we entered the streets of the Holy City with the rising sun.
The houses resembled those in Jidda with their carved oriel windows and enclosed balconies; but the stone of which they were built seemed to be heavier, more massive than the light-coloured coral stone of Jidda. It was still very early in the morning, but already a thick, brooding heat was growing. Before many of the houses stood benches on which exhausted men were sleeping. Narrower and narrower became the unpaved streets through which our rocking caravan moved toward the centre of the city. As only a few days remained before the festival of the Hajj, the crowds in the streets were very large. Innumerable pilgrims in the white ihram, and others who had temporarily changed again into their everyday clothes—clothes from all countries of the Muslim world, water carriers bent under heavy waterskins or under a yoke weighted by two old petroleum cans used as buckets, donkey drivers and riding donkeys with tinkling bells and gay trappings, and, to make the confusion complete, camels coming from the opposite direction, loaded with empty litters and bellowing in various tones. There was such a hubbub in the narrow streets that you might have thought the Hajj was not a thing that had taken place annually for centuries but a surprise for which the people had not been prepared. In the end our caravan ceased to be a caravan and became a disorderly tangle of camels, litters, baggage, pilgrims, camel drivers, and noise.
I had arranged from Jidda to stay in the house of a well-known mutawwif, or pilgrim’s guide, by name of Hasan Abid, but there seemed to be little chance of finding him or his house in this chaos. But suddenly someone shouted, “Hasan Abid! Where are you pilgrims for Hasan Abid?”—and, like a jinn from out of a bottle, a young man appeared before us and, with a deep bow, requested that we follow him; he had been sent by Hasan Abid to lead us to his house.
After an opulent breakfast served by the mutawwif, I went out, led by the same young man who had received us earlier, to the Holy Mosque. We walked through the teeming, buzzing streets, past butcher shops with rows of skinned sheep hanging before them; past vegetable vendors with their goods spread on straw mats on the ground; amidst swarms of flies and the smell of vegetables, dust, and perspiration; then through a narrow, covered bazaar in which only clothiers had their shops: a festival of colour. As elsewhere in the bazaars of western Asia and North Africa, the shops were only niches about one yard above ground level, with the shopkeeper sitting cross-legged, surrounded by his bolts of cloth of all materials and colours, while above him there hung in rows all manner of dress articles for all the nations of the Muslim world.
And, again, there were people of all races and garbs and expressions, some with turbans and others bareheaded; some who walked silently with lowered heads, perhaps with a rosary in their hands, and others who were running on light feet through the crowds; supple, brown bodies of Somalis, shining like copper from between the folds of their togalike garments; Arabs from the highlands of the interior, lean figures, narrow of face, proud of bearing; heavy-limbed, thickset Uzbeks from Bukhara, who even in this Meccan heat had kept to their quilted caftans and knee-high leather boots; sarong-clad Javanese girls with open faces and almond-shaped eyes; Moroccans, slow of stride and dignified in their white burnooses; Meccans in white tunics, their heads covered with ridiculously small skullcaps; Egyptian fellahin with excited faces; white-clad Indians with black eyes peering from under voluminous, snow-white turbans, and Indian women so impenetrably shrouded in their white burqas that they looked like walking tents; huge Fulani Negros from Timbuktu or Dahomey in indigo-blue robes and red skullcaps; and petite Chinese ladies, like embroidered butterflies, tripping along on minute, bound feet that resembled the hooves of gazelles. A shouting, thronging commotion in all directions, so that you felt you were in the midst of breaking waves of which you could grasp some details but never an integrated picture. Everything floated amid a buzz of innumerable languages, hot gestures, and excitement—until we found ourselves, suddenly, before one of the gates of the Haram, the Holy Mosque.
It was a triple-arched gate with stone steps climbing up to it; on the threshold sat a half-naked Indian beggar, stretching his emaciated hand toward us. And then I saw for the first time the inner square of the sanctuary, which lay below the level of the street—much lower than the threshold—and thus opened itself to the eye like a bowl: a huge quadrangle surrounded on all sides by many-pillared cloisters with semicircular arches, and in its centre a cube about forty feet high, draped in black, with a broad band of gold-embroidered verses from the Quran running around the upper portion of the covering: the Kaʿba . . .
This, then, was the Kaʿba, the goal of longing for so many millions of people for so many centuries. To reach this goal, countless pilgrims had made heavy sacrifices throughout the ages; many had died on the way; many had reached it only after great privations; and to all of them this small, square building was the apex of their desires, and to reach it meant fulfillment.
There it stood, almost a perfect cube (as its Arabic name connotes) entirely covered with black brocade, a quiet island in the middle of the vast quadrangle of the mosque: much quieter than any other work of architecture anywhere in the world. It would almost appear that he who first built the Kaʿba—for since the time of Abraham the original structure has been rebuilt several times in the same shape—wanted to create a parable of man’s humility before God. The builder knew that no beauty of architectural rhythm and no perfection of line, however great, could ever do justice to the idea of God: and so he confined himself to the simplest three-dimensional form imaginable—a cube of stone.
I had seen in various Muslim countries mosques in which the hands of great artists had created inspired works of art. I had seen mosques in North Africa, shimmering prayer palaces of marble and white alabaster; the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, a powerfully perfect cupola over a delicate understructure, a dream of lightness and heaviness united without contradiction; and the majestic buildings of Istanbul, the Suleymaniye, the Yeni-Valide, the Bayezid mosque; and those of Bursa in Asia Minor; and the Safavid mosques in Iran—royal harmonies of stone, multicolored majolica tiles, mosaics, huge stalactite portals over silver-embossed doors, slender minarets with alabaster and turquoise-blue galleries, marble-covered quadrangles with fountains and age-old plantain trees; and the mighty ruins of Tamerlane’s mosques in Samarkand, splendid even in decay.
All these had I seen—but never had I felt so strongly as now, before the Kaʿba, that the hand of the builder had come so close to his religious conception. In the utter simplicity of a cube, in the complete renunciation of all beauty of line and form, spoke this thought: “Whatever beauty man may be able to create with his hands, it will be only conceit to deem it worthy of God; therefore, the simplest that man can conceive is the greatest that he can do to express the glory of God.” A similar feeling may have been responsible for the mathematical simplicity of the Egyptian pyramids— although there man’s conceit had at least found a vent in the tremendous dimensions he gave to his buildings. But here, in the Kaʿba, even the size spoke of human renunciation and self-surrender; and the proud modesty of this little structure had no compare on earth.
There is only one entrance into the Kaʿba—a silver-sheathed door on the northeast side, about seven feet above ground level, so that it can only be reached by means of a movable wooden staircase which is placed before the door on a few days of the year. The interior, usually closed (I saw it only on later occasions), is very simple: a marble floor with a few carpets and lamps of bronze and silver hanging from a roof that is supported by heavy wooden beams. Actually, this interior has no special significance of its own, for the sanctity of the Kaʿba applies to the whole building, which is the qibla—that is, the direction of prayer—for the entire Islamic world. It is toward this symbol of God’s oneness that hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over turn their faces in prayer five times a day.
Embedded in the eastern corner of the building and left uncovered is a dark-coloured stone surrounded by a broad silver frame. This Black Stone, which has been kissed hollow by many generations of pilgrims, has been the cause of much misunderstanding among non-Muslims, who believe it to be a fetish taken over by Muhammad as a concession to the pagan Meccans. Nothing could be farther from truth. Just as the Kaʿba is an object of reverence but not of worship, so too is the Black Stone. It is revered as the only remnant of Abraham’s original building; and because the lips of Muhammad touched it on his Farewell Pilgrimage, all pilgrims have done the same ever since. The Prophet was well aware that all the later generations of the faithful would always follow his example: and when he kissed the stone, he knew that on it the lips of future pilgrims would forever meet the memory of his lips in the symbolic embrace he thus offered, beyond time and beyond death, to his entire community. And the pilgrims, when they kiss the Black Stone, feel that they are embracing the Prophet and all the other Muslims who have been here before them and those who will come after them.
No Muslim would deny that the Kaʿba had existed long before the Prophet Muhammad; indeed, its significance lies precisely in this fact. The Prophet did not claim to be the founder of a new religion. On the contrary: self-surrender to God—Islam—has been, according to the Quran, “man’s natural inclination” since the dawn of human consciousness; it was this that Abraham and Moses and Jesus and all the other prophets of God had been teaching—the message of the Quran being but the last of the Divine Revelations. Nor would a Muslim deny that the sanctuary had been full of idols and fetishes before Muhammad broke them, just as Moses had broken the golden calf at Sinai: for, long before the idols were brought into the Kaʿba, the true God had been worshipped there, and thus Muhammad did no more than restore Abraham’s temple to its original purpose.
And there I stood before the Temple of Abraham and gazed at the marvel without thinking (for thoughts and reflections came only much later), and out of some hidden, smiling kernel within me there slowly grew an elation like a song.
Smooth marble slabs, with sunlight reflections dancing upon them, covered the ground in a wide circle around the Kaʿba, and over these marble slabs walked many people, men and women, round and round the black-draped House of God. Among them were some who wept, some who loudly called to God in prayer, and many who had no words and no tears but could only walk with lowered heads . . .
It is part of the Hajj to walk seven times around the Kaʿba: not just to show respect to the central sanctuary of Islam but to recall to oneself the basic demand of Islamic life. The Kaʿba is a symbol of God’s oneness; and the pilgrim’s bodily movement around it is a symbolic expression of human activity, implying that not only our thoughts and feelings—all that is comprised in the term inner life—but also our outward, active life, our doings and practical endeavors, must have God as their centre.
And I, too, moved slowly forward and became part of the circular flow around the Kaʿba. Off and on I became conscious of a man or woman near me; isolated pictures appeared fleetingly before my eyes and vanished. There was a huge Negro in a white ihram, with a wooden rosary slung like a chain around a powerful, black wrist. An old Malay tripped along by my side for a while, his arms dangling, as if in helpless confusion, against his batik sarong. A grey eye under bushy brows—to whom did it belong?—and now lost in the crowd. Among the many people in front of the Black Stone, a young Indian woman: she was obviously ill; in her narrow, delicate face lay a strangely open yearning, visible to the onlooker’s eye like the life of fishes and algae in the depths of a crystal-clear pond. Her hands with their pale, upturned palms were stretched out toward the Kaʿba, and her fingers trembled as if in accompaniment to a wordless prayer . . .
I walked on and on, the minutes passed, all that had been small and bitter in my heart began to leave my heart, I became part of a circular stream— oh, was this the meaning of what we were doing: to become aware that one is a part of a movement in an orbit? Was this, perhaps, all confusion’s end? And the minutes dissolved, and time itself stood still, and this was the centre of the universe . . .
Nine days later Elsa died.
She died suddenly, after less than a week’s illness which at first had seemed to be no more than an indisposition due to heat and the unusual diet, but later turned out to be an obscure tropical ailment before which the Syrian doctors at the hospital of Mecca stood helpless. Darkness and utter despair closed around me.
She was buried in the sandy graveyard of Mecca. A stone was placed over her grave. I did not want any inscription on it; thinking of an inscription was like thinking of the future: and I could not conceive of any future now.
Elsa’s little son, Ahmad, remained with me for over a year and accompanied me on my first journey into the interior of Arabia—a valiant, ten-year-old companion. But after a time I had to say good-bye to him as well, for his mother’s family finally persuaded me that he must be sent to school in Europe; then nothing remained of Elsa except her memory and a stone in a Meccan graveyard and a darkness that was not lifted until long afterward, long after I had given myself up to the timeless embrace of Arabia. . . .
ARAFAT REMEMBERED Not far from here, hidden from my eyes in the midst of this lifeless wilderness of valleys and hills, lies the Plain of Arafat, on which all the pilgrims who come to Mecca assemble on one day of the year as a reminder of that Last Assembly, when man will have to answer to his Creator for all he has done in life. How often have I stood there myself, bare-headed, in the white pilgrim garb, among a multitude of white-garbed, bare-headed pilgrims from three continents, our faces turned toward the Jabal al-Rahma—the Mount of Mercy—which rises out of the vast plain: standing and waiting through the noon, through the afternoon, reflecting upon that inescapable day “when you will be exposed to view, and no secret of yours will remain concealed” . . .
And as I stand on the hillcrest and gaze down toward the invisible Plain of Arafat, the moonlit blueness of the landscape before me, so dead a moment ago, suddenly comes to life with the currents of all the human lives that have passed through it and is filled with the eerie voices of the millions of men and women who have walked or ridden between Mecca and Arafat in over thirteen hundred pilgrimages for over thirteen hundred years. Their voices and their steps and the voices and the steps of their animals reawaken and resound anew; I see them walking and riding and assembling—all those myriads of white-garbed pilgrims of thirteen hundred years; I hear the sounds of their passed-away days; the wings of the faith which has drawn them together to this land of rocks and sand and seeming deadness beat again with the warmth of life over the arc of centuries, and the mighty wingbeat draws me into its orbit and draws my own passed-away days into the present, and once again I am riding over the plain—
Riding in a thundering gallop over the plain, amidst thousands and thousands of ihram-clad Bedouins, returning from Arafat to Mecca—a tiny particle of that roaring, earth-shaking, irresistible wave of countless galloping dromedaries and men, with the tribal banners on their high poles beating like drums in the wind and their tribal war cries tearing through the air: “Ya Rawga, ya Rawga!” by which the Utayba tribesmen evoke their ancestor’s name, answered by the “Ya Awf, ya Awf!” of the Harb and echoed by the almost defiant, “Shammar, ya Shammar!” from the farthest right wing of the column.
We ride on, rushing, flying over the plain, and to me it seems that we are flying with the wind, abandoned to a happiness that knows neither end nor limit . . . and the wind shouts a wild paean of joy into my ears: “Never again, never again, never again will you be a stranger!”
My brethren on the right and my brethren on the left, all of them unknown to me but none a stranger: in the tumultuous joy of our chase, we are one body in pursuit of one goal. Wide is the world before us, and in our hearts glimmers a spark of the flame that burned in the hearts of the Prophet’s companions. They know, my brethren on the right and my brethren on the left, that they have fallen short of what was expected of them, and that in the flight of centuries their hearts have grown small: and yet, the promise of fulfilment has not been taken from them . . . from us . . .
Someone in the surging host abandons his tribal cry for a cry of faith: “We are the brethren of him who gives himself up to God!”—and another joins in: “Allahu akbar!”—“God is the greatest!—God alone is great!”
And all the tribal detachments take up this one cry. They are no longer Nejdi Bedouins reveling in their tribal pride: they are men who know that the secrets of God are but waiting for them . . . for us . . . Amidst the din of the thousands of rushing camels’ feet and the flapping of a hundred banners, their cry grows up into a roar of triumph: “Allahu akbar!”
It flows in mighty waves over the heads of the thousands of galloping men, over the wide plain, to all the ends of the earth: “Allahu akbar!” These men have grown beyond their own little lives, and now their faith sweeps them forward, in oneness, toward some uncharted horizons . . . Longing need no longer remain small and hidden; it has found its awakening, a blinding sunrise of fulfilment. In this fulfilment, man strides along in all his God-given splendour; his stride is joy, and his knowledge is freedom, and his world a sphere without bounds . . .
The smell of the dromedaries’ bodies, their panting and snorting, the thundering of their innumerable feet; the shouting of the men, the clanking of the rifles slung on saddle pegs, the dust and the sweat and the wildly excited faces around me; and a sudden, glad stillness within me.
I turn around in my saddle and see behind me the waving, weaving mass of thousands of white-clad riders and, beyond them, the bridge over which I have come: its end is just behind me while its beginning is already lost in the mists of distance.
216 This declaration of faith is the only “ritual” necessary to become a Muslim. In Islam, the terms Messenger and Prophet are interchangeable when applied to major prophets bearing a new message, like Muhammad, Jesus, Moses, Abraham.
217 Our relationship was resumed in 1935, after my father had at last come to understand and appreciate the reasons for my conversion to Islam. Although we never met again in person, we remained in continuous correspondence until 1942, when he and my sister were deported from Vienna by the Nazis and subsequently died in a concentration camp.