Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad

Abstract

It is now 10 years that Muhammad Asad, the twentieth-century's most influ­ential European Muslim, left us. But aside from his own biographical writ­ings-the best-seller The Road to Mecca (1954) and his 1988 interview with his old employer, the Franlifitrter (Allgemeine) 'ZeJtung- until recently there was no comprehensive biography of this illustrious man. This lacuna has now been filled -at least up to his official conversion to Islam in Berlin (1926) and Cairo (1927). This covers his quest as a student, film librettist, and jour­nalist "from Galicia [his native Lemberg and Czernovitz] to Arabia," ending with his preparations for ha]. The author is an unassuming but enthusiastic research assistant for eth­nology at Vienna's Austrian Academy of Sciences. Working like a detective and a good prosecutor (never taking a confession at face value), he has writ­ten what promises to become the definite biography of the early Leopold Weiss. His pioneering book is welcome for its set of rare (and mostly unpub­lished) photographs. Of these, a 1932 portrait makes the front cover haunt­ingly compelling by showing a Ghandi-like Asad with a shaven head and penetrating yet sensitive black eyes. Even better, it includes a three-page chronology, a complete list of his publications that tracks 45 German news­paper articles, and a three-page list of publications on Asad. And yet, despite its being so uncompromisingly academic, his text reads like a novel. It is no surprise that the author discovered that some of The Road to Mecca is elegantly fictitious and, according to Pola Hamida Asad, essen­ tially a "spiritual autobiography." (Did not Johann Wolfgang van Goethe entitle his Fact and Fiction?) Thus it is now established that his first wife, Elsa Schiemann (nee Sprecht) was not 15 but 22 years older than him, that her little son accompanied them on both "Oriental Journeys" (1922-23 and 1924-26), and that Zayd (their Arab companion) was a literary invention. Windhager reveals other more important facts: details about his moth­er's Feigenbawn family; the fate of his father, stepmother, and siblings (Dr. med. Heinrich Weiss and Dr.jur. Rachel Weiss) under Nazism, and Asad's attempts to save them from the concentration camps; his days at Vienna University, where he not only studied the history of art and philosophy but ...