About the Author

Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss in July 1900 in what was then Austro-Hungarian Lwów in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Lviv in Ukraine; died 1992) was a Jew who converted to Islam and later served as one of the first Pakistani ambassadors to the United Nations.

Works

• Road to Mecca
• The Message of The Qur'an
• Translation and commentary on the Sahih Bukhari
• This Law of Ours
• Islam at the Crossroads

His Connection with Pakistan

By the early 1930s Asad had gotten rather disenchanted by King Ibn Saud and his religious advisors and had begun travelling Eastwards into other Muslim lands. This brought him to British India and there he met and became a good friend of Dr. Mohammad Iqbal. Indeed, Iqbal encouraged him to write his book Islam at the Crossroads (published 1934); whose cover has the following testimonial from Iqbal:

“I have no doubt that coming as it does from a highly cultured European convert to Islam, it will prove an eye-opener to our younger generation.” Muhammad Iqbal.

In 1949 Asad joined the Pakistan Foreign Ministry as head of the Middle East Division and eventually in 1952 came to New York as Pakistan’s representative to the United Nations [......] He never really returned to Pakistan (although, supposedly, Gen. Zia ul Haq tried to get him back) and died in Europe in 1992.

It was his estrangement with the Pakistan government that pushed him back into writing and produced two amazing works - Road to Mecca and The Message of the Quran. However, here once again is a story of one who wished to give his all to Pakistan and we did not let him.

I quote myself: in the Februrary 1947 number of Arafat (p. 166): "The Pakistan movement… can become the starting-point of a new Islamic development if the Muslims realize - and continue realizing it when Pakistan is achieved - that the real, historic justification of this movement does not consist in our dressing or talking or salaaming differently from the other inhabitants of the country, or in the grievances which we may have against other communities, or even in the desire to provide more economic opportunities and more elbowroom for people who - by sheer force of habit - call themselves 'Muslims': But that such a justification is to be found only in the Muslims' desire to establish a truly Islamic polity: in other words, to translate the tenets of Islam into terms of practical life.'

This, in short, is my conception of Pakistan: and I do not think that I am far wrong in assuming that it is the conception of many other Muslims as well. Of many: but not all; and not even of most of them. For, by far the larger part of our intelligentsia do not seem to consider Pakistan in this light. To them, it means no more and no less than a way to freeing the Muslims of India from Hindu domination, and the establishment of a political structured in which the Muslim community would find its 'place in the sun' in the economic sense.

Islam comes into the picture only in so far as it happens to be the religion of the people concerned - just as Catholicism came into the picture in the Irish struggle for independence because it happened to be the religion of most Irishmen. To put it bluntly, many o four brother and sisters do not seem to care for the spiritual, Islamic objectives of Pakistan, and permit themselves to be carried away by sentiments not far removed from nationalism.; and this is especially true of many Muslims educated on western lines. They are unable to think otherwise than in western patterns of though, and so they do not believe in their hearts that the world's social and political problems are capable of being subordinated to purely religious considerations. Hence, their approach to Islam is governed by convention rather than ideology, and amounts, at best, to a faintly 'cultural' interest in their community's historical traditions.

Now this is a very poor view of Pakistan: a view, moreover, which does not do justice to the Islamic enthusiasm at present so markedly - if chaotically - displayed by the overwhelming masses of our common people. While many of our so-called intelligentsia are interested in Islam only in so far as it fits into their struggle for political self-determination, the common people most obviously desire self-determination for the sake of Islam as such.

As far as the Muslim masses are concerned, the Pakistan movement is rooted in their instinctive feeling that they are an ideological community and have as such every right to an autonomous political existence. In other words, they feel and know that their communal existence is not - as with other communities - based on racial affinities or on the consciousness of cultural traditions held in common, but only - exclusively - on the fact of their common adherence to the ideology of Islam: and that, therefore, they must justify their communal existence by erecting a socio-political structure in which that ideology -the Shariah -would become the visible expression of their nationhood.

This, and not a solution of the all-India problem of Muslim minorities, is the real, historic purpose of the Pakistan movement. Insofar as there will always remain non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan as well as Muslim minorities in the rest of India, Pakistan cannot be said to solve the minorities problem in its entirety.

But this is precisely a point which we - and our opponents - would do well to understand: the problem of minorities, however important in all considerations of India's political future, is, in itself, not fundamentally responsible for the Pakistan movement, but is rather an incidental accompaniment to the movement's intrinsic objective - the establishment of an Islamic polity in which our ideology could come to practical fruition. Only thus can we understand why the Muslims in, say, Bombay or Madras - who of course cannot expect that their provinces would become part of Pakistan, are as much interested in its realization as are the Muslims of the Punjab or of Bengal.

They are interested in Pakistan not because they hope to come within its orbit in a territorial sense, but because they feel, as intensely as their brethren in the so-called 'Muslim majority' provinces, that the birth of an Islamic polity in Pakistan would vindicate the claim that Islam is a practical proposition, and that the Muslims - because of their being Muslims - are a nation unto themselves, irrespective of their geographical location.

For, in this respect, the Pakistan movement is truly unique among all the political mass movements now evident anywhere in the Muslim world. No doubt, in the vast territories that go by this name there are many other lovers of Islam besides us, but nowhere in the modern world, except in the Pakistan movement, has a whole Muslim nation set out on the march towards Islam. Some of those states, like Turkey and (the then Shah's) Iran, are explicitly anti-Islamic in their governmental aims, and openly declare that Islam should be eliminated from politics and from the people's social life. But even those Muslim states in which religion is still being valued - in varying degrees - as a spiritual treasure, are 'Islamic' only insofar as Islam is the religion professed by the majority of their inhabitants: while their political aims are not really governed by Islamic considerations but, rather, by what the rulers or ruling classes conceive as 'national' interests in exactly the sense in which national interests are conceived in the West.
In the Pakistan movement, on the other hand, there undoubtedly exists such a direct connection between the people's attachment to Islam and their political aims. Rather, more than that: the practical success of this movement is exclusively due to our people's passionate, if as yet inarticulate, desire to have a state in which the forms and objectives of government would be determined by the ideological imperatives of Islam - a state, that is, in which Islam would not be just a religious and cultural 'label' of the people concerned, but the very goal and purpose of state-formation.

And it goes without saying that an achievement of such an Islamic state - the first in the modern world - would revolutionize Muslim political thought everywhere, and would probably inspire other Muslim peoples to strive towards similar ends; and so it might become a prelude to an Islamic reorientation in many parts of the world.

Thus, the Pakistan movement contains a great promise for an Islamic revival: and it offers almost the only hope of such a revival in a world that is rapidly slipping away from the ideals of Islam. But the hope is justified only so long as our leaders, and the masses with them, keep the true objective of Pakistan in view, and do not yield to the temptation to regard their movement as just another of the many 'national' movements so fashionable in the present-day Muslim world.

There is an acute danger of the Pakistan movement being deflected form its ideological course by laying too much stress on a 'cultural' nationalism - on a community of interests arising not so much from a common ideology as from the desire to preserve certain cultural traits, social habits and customs and, last but not the least, to safeguard the economic development of a group of people who happen to be 'Muslims' only by virtue of their birth. Nobody can doubt that the cultural traditions and the immediate economic requirements of the Muslim community are extremely important in our planning the Muslim fixture on Islamic lines. But this is just the point: they should never be viewed independently of our ideological goal - the building of our fixture on Islamic lines.

It appears, however, that the majority of our intelligentsia are about to commit just this mistake. When they talk of Pakistan, they often convey the impression that the 'actual' interests of the Muslim world could be viewed independently of what is described as the 'purely ideological' interests of Islam; in other words, that it is possible to be a good Pakistani without being primarily interested in Islam as the basic reality in one's own and in the community's life.

[However], such an arbitrary division between 'Muslim' and 'Islamic' interests is sheer nonsense. Islam is not just one among several characteristics of Muslim communal existence, but its only historical cause and justification: and to consider Muslim interests as something apart from Islam is like considering a living being as something apart from the fact of its life.

It should [therefore] be our leaders' duty to tell their followers that they must become better Muslims today in order to be worthy of Pakistan tomorrow: instead of which they merely assure us that we shall become better Muslims 'as soon as Pakistan is achieved'.

This easy assurance will not do. It is self-deceptive in the extreme. If we do not sow the seeds of Islamic life now, when our enthusiasm is at its fighting pitch, there is no earthly reason to expect that we will suddenly be transformed into better Muslims when the struggle is over and our political autonomy secured.

I can almost hear some of our leaders say: 'Brother, you are too pessimistic - or perhaps a little bit too apprehensive. Almost every one of us desires a truly Islamic life. Only, it would be impolitic to insist on this ideal right now. In our ranks there are many people who render the most valuable services to our political cause, but - owing to a wring upbringing - do not care too much for religion; and if we stress the religious side of our struggle from the very beginning, those valuable workers might cool down in their zeal, and so be lost to our cause. We do not want to lose them: we cannot afford to lose them: and so we are obliged to postpone our work for the people's religious uplift until after we have won a state of our own. At present, we must concentrate all our energies on the short-term objective before us - the freeing of the Muslims from non-Muslim domination - and not dissipate them on purely religious considerations. If we insist, at this stage, too loudly on our long-term objective - the deepening of Islamic consciousness in the Muslims and the creation of a truly Islamic polity - we might not only estrange many of our westernized brothers and sisters from our cause, but also increase the apprehensions of the non-Muslim minorities who live in the area of Pakistan.'

The above reasoning is extremely fallacious and intellectually dishonest.