Muhammad Asad

Muhammad Asad, born Leopold Weiss in the Polish city of Lvov in 1900, was the grandson of an orthodox Rabbi. By his early twenties he could write and read German, French and Polish languages. He took to journalism and travelled the Middle East as the correspondent of Frankfurter Zeitung of Germany. After his conversion to Islam, he again travelled and worked throughout the Muslim world, including Arabia, Iran, Jordan, North Africa and Pakistan. In 1953 he was appointed as Pakistan’s plenipotentiary to the United Nations. He later settled in Spain where he died on February 20, 1992. He is buried in the Muslim cemetery in Granada, Spain. Apart from his magnum opus, The Message of the Qur’an, his other works include Islam at the Crossroads, The Road to Mecca, The Principles of State and Government in Islam, and This Law of Ours.