Born to a Jewish family in Austria-Hungary in 1900, Muhammad Asad (né Leopold Weiss) converted to Islam in 1926. He went on to become one of the most influential Islamic thinkers of the 20th century, writing theoretical treatises on Islam and politics and advising the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Later he withdrew from political life to focus on scholarship, writing an English translation of the Quran that remains in use today. Unsurprisingly, he became a Muslim out of antagonism to Zionism and Judaism, as Shalom Goldman writes:
Weiss visited [Palestine prior to his conversion]—but it seems that nothing in Zionist activity appealed to him. Quite the contrary, Zionism and its followers repelled him, and his articles to that effect in the German and Austrian press further distanced him from his Jewish co-religionists in general and from his family in particular. . . .
Asad’s conversion to Islam in 1926 was linked to his rejection of Zionism. He saw Zionism as “tribal” and connected it with colonialism. In his later writings Zionism is depicted as an aspect of the “chosen-people” concept, a concept Asad often mentions with derision in his Quran commentary. For Asad, Islam is “universalist” and Judaism is “particularistic.”
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