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Muhammad Asad Quotes

Muhammad Asad was an Austro-Hungarian-born Muslim journalist, traveler, writer, linguist, political theorist, diplomat and Islamic scholar. Asad was one of the most influential European Muslims of the 20th century.By age 13, Weiss had acquired a passing fluency in Hebrew and Aramaic, on top of his native German and Polish languages. By his mid-twenties, he could read and write in English, French, Persian and Arabic. In Mandatory Palestine, Weiss engaged in arguments with Zionist leaders like Chaim Weizmann, voicing his reservations about some aspects of the Zionist Movement. After traveling across the Arab World as a journalist, he converted to Sunni Islam in 1926 and adopted the name "Muhammad Asad"—Asad being the Arabic rendition of his root name Leo .During his stay in Saudi Arabia, he spent time with Bedouins and enjoyed the close company of the state's founder, Ibn Saud. He also carried out a secret mission for Ibn Saud to trace the sources of funding for the Ikhwan Revolt. Due to these activities, he was dubbed in a Haaretz article as "Leopold of Arabia"—hinting similarity of his activities to those of Lawrence of Arabia. On his visit to India, Asad became friends with Muslim poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who persuaded him to abandon his eastward travels and "help elucidate the intellectual premises of the future Islamic state". He also spent five years in internment by the British Government at the outbreak of World War II. On 14 August 1947, Asad received Pakistani citizenship and later served at several bureaucratic and diplomatic positions including the Director of Department of Islamic Reconstruction, Deputy Secretary in the Foreign Ministry of Pakistan, and Pakistan's Envoy to the United Nations.In the West, Asad rose to prominence as a writer with his best-selling autobiography, The Road to Mecca. Later, after seventeen years of scholarly research, he published his magnum opus: The Message of the Qur'an—an English translation and commentary of the Quran. The book, along with the translations of Pickthall and Yusuf Ali, is regarded as one of the most influential translations of the modern era. An ardent proponent of Ijtihad and rationality in interpreting religious texts, he dedicated his works "to People who Think".

In 2008, the entrance square to the UN Office in Vienna was named Muhammad Asad Platz in commemoration of his work as a "religious bridge-builder". Asad has been described by his biographers as "Europe's gift to Islam" and "a Mediator between Islam and the West". Wikipedia  

✵ 2. July 1900 – 23. February 1992

Works

The Principles of State and Government in Islam
The Road to Mecca
The Road to Mecca
Muhammad Asad
Islam at the Crossroads
Muhammad Asad: 35 quotes2 likes

Famous Muhammad Asad Quotes

“We allow ourselves to be blown by the winds because we do know what we want: our hearts know it, even if our thoughts are sometimes slow to follow- but in the end they do catch up with our hearts and then we think we have made a decision.”

Muhammad Asad book The Road to Mecca

Page 68.
The Road to Mecca (1954)

“Instead of being given a true, simple—and therefore easily understandable—picture of Islamic Law, the Muslims are presented with a gigantic, many-sided edifice of fiqhi deductions and interpretations (a secondhand Islam, as it were) arrived at by individual scholars and schools of thought a thousand years ago.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 6: Conclusion, p 100

“They (the British Rulers) devised for us an educational system in which all independence of thought would be stifled from the very first stages of one's school life—for, according to Macaulay, such a system was the best means of obtaining suit­able clerks for the offices of the East India Company and, besides, of training obedient subjects.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 6, p 112

“It doesn't matter if you agree or disagree with my interpretations, even the classical Quran commentators disagreed on many details. Disagreement deepens our understanding of the Quran.”

Muhammad Asad

Documentary, A Road To Mecca

“A state, in order to be truly Islamic, must arrange the affairs of the community in such a way that every individual, man and woman, shall enjoy that minimum of material well-being without which there can be no human dignity, no real freedom and, in the last resort, no spiritual progress.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 5: The Citizens And The Government, p 89

“Although science is well qualified to make us progressively comprehend something of the world around us and of the life within us, it is neither able nor called upon to pronounce a judgment regarding the spiritual goal of human life and thus to provide us with ethical guidance.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Answers of Islam, Answer to Question # 3, p 142

Muhammad Asad Quotes about life

“While I thus cogitate in disquiet and perplexity, half submerged in dark waters of a well in an Arabian oasis, I suddenly hear a voice from the background of my memory, the voice of an old Kurdish nomad: If water stands motionless in a pool it grows stale and muddy, but when it moves and flows it becomes clear: so, too, man in his wanderings. Whereupon, as if by magic, all disquiet leaves me. I begin to look upon myself with distant eyes, as you might look at the pages of a book to read a story from them; and I begin to understand that my life could not have taken a different course. For when I ask myself, 'What is the sum total of my life?' somthing in me seems to answer, 'You have set out to exchange one world for another-to gain a new world for yourself in exchange for an old one which you never really possessed.”

Muhammad Asad book The Road to Mecca

And I know with startling clarity that such an undertaking might indeed take an entire lifetime.
Page 48.
The Road to Mecca (1954)

“There is not only one form of the Islamic state, but many; and it is for the Muslims of every period to discover the form most suitable to their needs—on the condition, of course, that the form and the institutions they choose are in full agreement with the explicit, unequivocal shariah laws relating to communal life.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 2: Terminology And Historical Precedent, p 23

“We are neither a racial nor a national entity in the conventional meaning of this term; we have become a nation only on the strength of an ideology, a common belief in a particular way of life: and that ideology, that way of life is expressed in one single word: Islam.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 4, p 105

“By imitating the manners and the mode of life of the West, the Muslims are being gradually forced to adopt the Western moral outlook: for the imitation of outward appearance leads, by degrees, to a corresponding assimilation of the world-view responsible for that appearance.”

Muhammad Asad book Islam at the Crossroads

Page. 70.
Islam at the Crossroads (1934)

“A state inhabited predominantly or even entirely by Muslims is not necessarily synonymous with an "Islamic state": it can become truly Islamic only by virtue of a conscious application of the sociopolitical tenets of Islam to the life of the nation, and by an incorporation of those tenets in the basic constitution of the country.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 1: The Issue Before Us, p 1

“Literally, this word (Islam) denotes "self­-surrender" and, in the deeper sense, "man's self-surrender to God". As soon as we become fully aware that God exists, and thereupon surrender ourselves to Him both in our faith and in our attitudes, we fulfil the meaning of our life.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Answers of Islam, Answer to Question # 17, p 158

Muhammad Asad Quotes

“Within the Islamic concept of society there is no room for the concept of a "secular" state for the simple reason that Islam does not admit of any separation between "religious" and "mundane" life-concerns.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Answers of Islam, Answer to Question # 24, p 165

“It is not quite reasonable to expect of our Govern­ment that it should lead us in the direction of Islamic integrity and solidarity—while that integrity and solidarity are absent in our own behavior.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 7, p 116

“The cause of the intellec­tual and spiritual decadence of the entire Muslim world is not to be found in a supposedly overwhelming "worldli­ness" of the Muslim people but, on the contrary, in the insufficient worldliness on the part of their religious leadership: a failure which resulted in the gradual alienation of the Muslim faith from the Muslim reality.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Islam And The Spirit Of Our Times, p 133

“Some Muslim scholars argue that the concept of Democracy is not compatible with the concept of an Islamic state. But of course it is and the Quran outlines the essence of Democracy.”

Muhammad Asad

Documentary, A Road To Mecca.

“A "Presidential" system of government, somewhat akin to that practiced in the United States, would correspond more closely to the requirements of an Islamic polity than a "Parliamentary" government in which the executive powers are shared by a cabinet jointly and severally responsible to the legislature.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 4: Relationship Between Executive and Legislature, p 61

“The poet-philosopher put greater stress on the spiritual aspect of our struggle, while the Quaid-e-Azam was mainly concerned with outlining its political aspect: but both were one in their intense desire to assure to the Muslims of India a future on Islamic lines.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 5, p 108

“Their [Conservative Muslims'] insistence that a modem Islamic state would have to be an exact replica of the "historic precedents" of our past is apt to bring the very idea of the Islamic state into discredit and ridicule.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 6: Conclusion, p 97

“True progress is not possible without a variety of opinions, for it is only through the friction of variously constituted intellects and through the stimulating effect they have on one another that social problems are gradually clarified and thus brought within the range of solution.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 3: Government By Consent And Consent, p 48

“For let there be no mistake about it: freedom is not an end in itself—it is only a means to an end. The moment you achieve freedom from something, the question arises: What is this freedom for? It is this question which the Muslim millah is now being called upon to answer.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast #1, p 92

“In the last resort, the moral quality of a government—of any government—is conditioned by the moral quality of the people whom it governs: for it is the people themselves who produce the personnel of the great administrative machinery which we describe as "government."”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 7, p 116

“The ideology of Islam is as practicable or as impracticable as we Muslims choose to make it.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 6: Conclusion, p 107

“A Muslim is he who carries the fear of God in his heart and tries, by following the ways of Islam, to rise in spiritual stature: and not merely he who happens to have been born in a Muslim house and bears a Muslim name.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 7, p 117

“It is only within the framework of an independent ideological state built on the principles of Islam and endowed with all the machinery of government, legislation, and law-enforcement that the ideals of Islam can be brought to practical fruition.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 6: Conclusion, p 96

“No nation can prosper unless the men and women of whom it is composed apply to their own behaviour the same high standards of social morality as they demand of the officers of their government; for it is your fathers, your sons and your brothers—in a word, it is yourselves—who are responsible for the country's administration.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Calling All Muslims, Radio Broadcast # 6, p 114

“Jew or Arab. Both here are brimming over with an intolerant hatred that leads them nowhere. Each side says to the other: You do not belong here.”

Muhammad Asad

Documentary, A Road To Mecca.

“There can be not the least doubt that an Islamic constitution to be evolved thirteen centuries after the Right-Guided Caliphs may legitimately differ from that which was valid in and for their time.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 2: Terminology And Historical Precedent, p 27

“Human ingenuity has not evolved a better method for corporate decisions than the majority principle.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 3: Government By Consent And Consent, p 50

“The Law-Giver meant us Muslims to provide for the necessary, additional legislation through the exercise of our Ijtihad (Independent Reasoning) in consonance with the spirit of Islam.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 1: The Issue Before Us, p 14

“Islam is a complete, self-contained ideology which regards all aspects of our existence—moral and physical, spiritual and intellectual, personal and communal—as parts of the indivisible whole which we call "human life."”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 6: Conclusion, p 95

“To give a valid Islamic content, as well as a creative, positive direction to the people's dreams and desires; to prepare them not only politically (in the conventional context of this word) but also spiritually and ideologically for the great goal of Pakistan: this is the supreme task awaiting our leaders.”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: What Do we Mean by Pakistan, p 84

“The duty and the right to express one's opinion freely may be meaningless—and on occasion even injurious to the best interests of the society—if those opinions are not based on sound thought, which, in its turn, presupposes the possession of sound knowledge.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 5: The Citizens And The Government, p 86

“Our reason tells us that a community based on ideas held in common is a far more advanced manifestation of human life than a community resulting from race or language or geographical location.”

Muhammad Asad book The Principles of State and Government in Islam

Source: The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), Chapter 6: Conclusion, p 96

“All scientific research is of utmost sig­nificance in the world-view of Islam, for it enables us to comprehend better and better the fact that all creation is based upon a definite divine plan, and is thus apt to strengthen and deepen our conviction of God's existence and omnipotence”

Muhammad Asad

Source: This Law of Ours and Other Essays (1987), Chapter: Answers of Islam, Answer to Question # 3, p 141

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