Road To Mecca Summary

Road to Mecca is wrote by Muhammad Asad who is the main character of this book. Muhammad Asad previously known as Leopold Weiss, born on 2 July 1900 and died on 20 february 1992. He was a jewish-born Austro-Hungarian journalist, traveller, writer, linguist, thinker, political theorist, diplomat and Islamic scholar. He was one of the most influential European Muslims of the 20th century. By the age of thirteen, young Weiss had acquired a passing fluency in Hebrew and Aramaic, other than his native languages German and Polish. By his mid-twenties, he could read and write in English, French, Persian and Arabic. In Palestine, Weiss engaged in arguments with Zionist leaders like Chaim Weizmann, voicing his criticism of the Zionist Movement. After …show more content…
He enlisted at the age of 14 but his father extricated him from the Austrian army by informing the authorities of his true age! By the time he was old enough to be conscripted, the war was almost over. Weimar Germany, where Asad recreates the intellectual and social ferment of the time. The author himself was caught up in the free love environment. He broke into journalism by getting a scoop: an interview with the wife of Maxime Gorky while she was in Berlin to raise relief funds for the Russian …show more content…
Throughout he reflects upon the meaning of Islam. That is why the book engages the modern reader despite being set almost 90 years ago. The author had explaining the revolutionary message of the Prophet. "He began by telling people that action is part of faith: for God is not merely concerned with a person’s beliefs but also with his or her doings – especially such doings as affect other people besides oneself. He preached, with the most flaming imagery that God had put at his disposal, against the oppression of the weak by the strong. He propounded the unheard-of thesis that men and women were equal before God and that all religious duties and hopes applied to both alike; he even went so far as to declare, to the horror of all right-minded pagan Meccans, that a woman was a person in her own right, and not merely by virtue of her relationship with men as mother, sister, wife or daughter, and that, therefore, she was entitled to own property, to do business on her own and to dispose of her own person in marriage! He condemned all games of chance and all forms of intoxicants, for in the words of the Koran, great evil and some advantage is in them, but the evil is greater than the advantage. To top it all, he stood up against the traditional exploitation of man by man; against profits from interest-bearing loans, whatever the rate of interest; against private monopolies and ‘corners’; against gambling on