The Road To Mecca by Muhammad Asad

Author:Muhammad Asad [Asad, Muhammad]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs
Publisher: The Book Foundation
Published: 2014-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

THE NEW INSIGHT I had gained, and the progress I was making in the Arabic language (I had arranged for a student of Al-Azhar to give me daily lessons), made me feel that now at last I possessed something like a key to the Muslim mind. No longer was I so certain that a European 'could never consciously grasp the total picture', as I had written in my book only a few months earlier; for now this Muslim world no longer seemed so entirely alien to Western associations. It occurred to me that if one was able to achieve a certain degree of detachment from his own past habits of thought and allow for the possibility that they might not be the only valid ones, the once so strange Muslim world might indeed become graspable . . .

But although I found much in Islam that appealed to my intellect as well as to my instincts, I did not consider it desirable for an intelligent man to conform all his thinking and his entire view of life to a system not devised by himself.

'Tell me, Shaykh Mustafa,' I asked my erudite friend Al-Maraghi on one occasion, 'why should it be necessary to confine oneself to one particular teaching and one particular set of injunctions? Mightn't it be better to leave all ethical inspiration to one's inner voice?'

'What thou art really asking, my young brother, is why should there be any institutional religion. The answer is simple. Only very few people - only prophets - are really able to understand the inner voice that speaks in them. Most of us are trammelled by our personal interests and desires - and if everyone were to follow only what his own heart dictates, we would have complete moral chaos and could never agree on any mode of behaviour.

Thou couldst ask, of course, whether there are no exceptions to the general rule - enlightened people who feel they have no need to be "guided" in what they consider to be right or wrong; but then, I ask thee, would not many, very many people claim that exceptional right for themselves? And what would be the result?'

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