The Following is an excerpt from Allama Asad’s famous autobiography”The Road to Makka “
Mr Assad narrates about the event that removed his doubt about quran and convinced him that quran is a divine and not human written and he with his wife converted to islam..
Mr assad was a famous writer and journalist of earlier twentieth cetuary, who reverted back to islam after through reading…his book is a must read …..
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ONE DAY-it was in september 1926-Elsa( wife of allama assad) and I found ourselves travelling in the berlin subway. It was an upper class compartment. My eye fell casually on a well dressed man opposite to me, apparently a well-to-do bussiness man , with a beautiful briefcase on his kness and a large diamond ring on his hand.I thought idly how well the portly figure of this man fitted into the picture of prosperity which one encountered every where in Central europe in those days:but when I looked at his face , I did not seem to be looking at a happy face . He appeared to be worried : and not merely worried but acutely unhappy, with eyes staring vacantly aheadand the corners of his mouth drawn in as if in pain- but not in bodily pain. Not wanting to be rude, I turned my eyes away and saw next to him a lady of some elegence. She also had an strangely unhappy expression on her face , as if contemplating or experiencing something that caused her pain; nevertheless , her mouth was fixed on the stiff sembelence of a smile which, I was certain, must have been habitual. And then I began to look around at all other faces in the compartment –faces belonging without exception to welll dressed well-fed people and in almost everyone of them I could discern an expression of hidden suffering , so hidden that the owner of the face seemed to be quite unaware of it.
This was indeed strange . I had never before seen so many unhappy faces around me or was it perhaps that I had never before looked for what was now so loudly speaking in them? The impression was so strong that I mentioned it to elsa and she too began to look around her with carefull eyes of a painter accustomed to study the human features. Then she turned to me , astonished, and said ‘ you are right . They all look as though they were suffering torments of hell….i wonder do they know themselves what is going on in them?’
I knew that they did not-for otherwise they could not go for wasting their lives as they did , without any faith in binding truths, without any goals beyond the desire to raise their own ‘standards of living’ without any hopes otherthen having more material amenities, more gadgets, and perhaps more power……
When we returned home , I happened to glance at my desk on which lay open a copy of the quran I had been reading earlier…Mechanickly I picked it up to put it away, but just as I was about about to close it, my eye fell on the open page, and I read
You are obsessed with by greed for more and more
Until you go down to your graves.
Nay, but you will come to know!
Nay,but you will come to know!
Nay,if you but knew it with the knowledge of certainty:
You would indeed see the hell you are in.
In time , indeed, you shal see it with the eyes of certainty:
And on that Day you will be asked what you have done with the boon of life.*
For the moment I was speechless. I think the book shook in my hand. Then I handed it to elsa. ‘read this. Is it not the answer to what we saw in the subway?’
It was an answer: an answer so decisive that all doubt was suddenly at an end . I knew now, beyond any doubt, that it was a GOD inspired book I was holding in my hand: for although had been placed before men thirteen centuary ago, it clearly anticipated something that could have true only in this complicated , mechanized, phantom-ridden ages of ours.( more obvious now-bao)
At all the time people had known greed: but at no time before this had greed outgrown mere eagerness to acquire things and become an obsession that blurred the sight of of every thing else: an irresistable craving to get,to do, to contrive more and more-more today then yesterday, and more tomorrow then today ( we can witness that- bao): **a demon riding on the necks of man and whipping their hearts forward toward goals that tauntingly glitter in the distence but dissolve into contemptible nothingness as soon as they are reached, always holding out the promise of new goals ahead- goals still more briliant , more tempting as long as they lie in horizan, and bound to wither into further nothingness as they come within grasp ** and that hunger that insatiable hunger for evernew goals gnawing at man’s soul : * Nay , if you but knew it you would see the hell you are in…… *
This, I saw , was not a mere human wisdom of a distant past in distant arabia. However wise he may have been, such a man could not by himself have forseen the torment so peculiar to this twentieth centuary. Out of the quran spoke a voice reater then Muhammad :saw:
After seeing this I sought out an indian muslim friend and told him that I wanted to embrace islam , after some days my wife did the same
Hope we all can get a lesson or two from this …