Religion: Around the Kaaba

What is the faith of the world’s 315 million Moslems, who follow Mohammed, the camel driver, and at the same time revere Jesus as a great spiritual leader? The world’s 787 million Christians, who follow Jesus, the carpenter, and hardly ever think of Mohammed at all, need to know, for what Moslems think and do in the years ahead will make a lot of difference to the West. Yet there is a dearth of interpreters. One of the most surprising since Lawrence of Arabia is a Polish Jew named Leopold Weiss, who is now a Pakistani Moslem named Muhammad Asad.

Educated by his well-to-do family in art and philosophy, he wandered through Europe after World War I, sopping up psychoanalysis in Vienna, writing movie scripts in Berlin, working as a special correspondent for the famed Frankfurter Zeitung. He visited Jerusalem, talked with the great Zionist pioneer, Chaim Weizmann. At last he began to find what he was looking for—but it was among the Arabs, not his fellow Jews, that he found it. In 1926 he became a Moslem.

No Sin. This strange pilgrimage of the spirit is recounted with rich journalistic detail—and a style occasionally reminiscent of Turkish delight—in Asad’s autobiography. The Road to Mecca (Simon & Schuster; $5). There are vivid pictures of such figures as the late King Ibn Saud (whom he served as unofficial adviser) and of the beauties and terrors of the great Nufud Desert (where Asad was caught in a sandstorm without supplies and lost for three days). Threaded through the travelogues is a warm and enlightening picture of the world’s second largest religion and its believers, who seem to Asad to be free of “those phantoms of fear, greed and inhibition that made European life so ugly.”

Watching the busy calisthenics of the Moslems at prayer, Asad once asked an old Mecca pilgrim the reason for all the physical activity. “How else then should we worship God?” he replied. “Did He not create both soul and body together? And this being so, should not man pray with his body as well as with his soul?”

As Leopold Weiss, Asad had flirted with conversion to Christianity, which he found superior to Judaism “in that it did not restrict God’s concern to any one group of people.” But one thing put him off: “The distinction it made between the soul and the body, the world of faith and the world of practical affairs.” Not so Islam. “Nowhere in the Koran could I find any reference to a need for ‘salvation.’ No original, inherited sin stood between the individual and his destiny … No asceticism was required to open a hidden gate to purity: for purity was man’s birthright, and sin meant no more than a lapse from the innate, positive qualities. . . . Was not perhaps this teaching . . . responsible for the emotional security I had so long sensed in the Arabs?

The Center. It was this sinless monism, Asad claims, this “new creed that gave them to understand that man was God’s vicar on earth,” that brought about the mass conversions to Islam during the great Moslem expansion that reached as far as Spain. It was “not a legendary ‘conversion at the point of the sword.’ ” But Asad does not ignore the centuries of stagnation that overcame a vigorous society: “As soon as their faith became habit and ceased to be a program of life . . . the creative impulse . . . gradually gave way to indolence, sterility and cultural decay.”

Moslems practice what many Christians merely preach: “The priesthood of all believers,” as the primitive church called it. All adult Moslems of sound mind may perform any religious function. This Asad found a great advantage. “The absence of all priesthood, clergy, and even of an organized ‘church’ makes every Moslem feel that he is truly sharing in,and not merely attending, a common act of worship.”

One of the duties of the Moslem on a had (pilgrimage) is to walk seven times around the Kaaba, the great black cube in Mecca that is the center of Islam and the symbol of God’s oneness. Pilgrim Asad “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 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 center of the universe . . .”