The life Of Muhammad Asad , Leopold Weiss (1900-1992)

A few months later, Weiss returned to Berlin. But the words of his Afghanhost never completely left his mind."You are obsessed by greed for more and more until you go downto your graves""In the arrogance of their blindness, the people of the West areconvinced that it is their civilization that will bring light andhappiness to the world … In the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies they thought of spreading the gospel of Christianity allover the world; but now that their religious ardour has cooled somuch that they consider religion no more than soothingbackground music – allowed to accompany, but not to influence,'real' life – they have begun to spread instead the materialisticgospel of the 'Western way of life': the belief that all humanproblems can be solved in factories, laboratories and on the desksof statisticians."It was 1926, and Weiss was back to Berlin after his second long journey inthe Muslim lands. After years of inflation, there was now prosperityeverywhere in central Europe. At home after long travels, he startedstudying the Qur'an in translation because his Arabic at that time was stillnot good enough. He and Elsa would often read the Qur'an together anddiscuss its ideas, and Elsa also began to be impressed by the inner cohesionbetween the Qur'an's moral teachings and practical life program. Then anextra ordinary incident happened.One day he and his wife Elsa were traveling by underground train in Berlinwhen he saw a strange phenomenon –It was an upper-class compartment. My eye fell casually on a well-dressedman opposite me, apparently a well-to-do businessman, with a beautifulcase on his knees and a large diamond ring on his hand. I thought idly howwell the portly figure of this man fitted into picture of prosperity which