1900–1992 · Austria-Hungary; Arabia; British India / Pakistan; Spain · Journalist, Qur'an translator, political theorist, diplomat
Muhammad Asad was born Leopold Weiss in 1900 in Lemberg (now Lviv), then part of Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family with a rabbinical lineage, and received a grounding in Hebrew and the Hebrew Bible as a boy. After brief university studies in Vienna he turned to journalism. In 1922 he travelled to Palestine and the wider Middle East, and his reports for the Frankfurter Zeitung, which questioned the Zionist project and described Arab society sympathetically, became the basis of his first book, Unromantisches Morgenland (1924).
He embraced Islam in Berlin in 1926 and spent the following years in Arabia, where he studied Arabic and the religious sciences and came to know King ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn Saʿūd. In 1932 he went to British India, where Muhammad Iqbal encouraged him to work on the intellectual foundations of a future Muslim polity. There he wrote Islam at the Crossroads (1934), began an annotated English translation of Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, and was interned by the British as an enemy alien during the Second World War.
After 1947 Asad took Pakistani citizenship, directed the Department of Islamic Reconstruction in Punjab and joined the foreign service, representing Pakistan at the United Nations in 1952. He then devoted himself to writing: the autobiography The Road to Mecca (1954), The Principles of State and Government in Islam (1961), which argued that Islamic principles are compatible with constitutional and consultative government, and The Message of the Qur’an (1980), an English translation with commentary that emphasises reason and historical context.
Asad spent his last years in Morocco and Spain and died in 1992 near Málaga; he was buried in Granada. His translation of the Qur’an and his memoir remain widely read, and he is often cited as an influence on reform-minded and rationalist approaches to scripture and politics.