"You Are a Muslim, but You Don't Know It": An Afghan Governor to a European | The Road to Mecca (10)

After the sunset prayer in the Prophet's Mosque, a young man of the Harb tribe asks: why do the Franks wear hats that shade their eyes? How do they see the sky? And the one who will answer him is a man who came from among them. In this episode Muhammad Asad sits in an old library in Medina with Sheikh Abdullah ibn Bulayhid, and tells why he likened Western civilisation to the "one-eyed" Dajjal; then memory takes him back to a snowy day in Afghanistan, when a young governor told him "You are a Muslim, but you do not know it," and to the underground train in Berlin, after which his eyes fell on the words "Rivalry in worldly increase distracts you." 00:00 "A creature with a single eye" 00:13 Opening 00:35 The library 01:11 "Marry" 01:42 Five minarets 02:29 The single eye 03:25 "You are a Muslim" 04:29 The bridge 05:05 The underground train 05:58 The father's silence 06:50 Closing Join the conversation in the comments. Answer yes or no: 1. Was Muhammad Asad a Muslim when the Afghan governor told him "You are a Muslim, but you do not know it"? 2. Did his wife Elsa also become a Muslim? 3. Did his father reply to his first letter about his conversion? Source: Muhammad Asad, The Road to Mecca (1954), Chapter Ten, "Dajjal." On his life: Martin Kramer, "The Road from Mecca: Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss)" (1999); Günther Windhager, Leopold Weiss alias Muhammad Asad (2002). Honesty note: all the scenes and dialogues are from Asad's own account in his book, given in meaning rather than word for word, except what is in quotation marks. The description of the Dajjal here is as Asad phrased it for the Bedouin, and some of its details are his own wording, not the text of the hadith. His view of Western civilisation is his own, and we tell it as he told it. "A man who has been a Muslim for years, and still searching", "the memory of his childhood in the Torah, present at the heart of his new faith", "we do not make it a judgement on the peoples of the West", and "an eye that criticises in both directions, and spares no one" are our reading, not his words. His declaration of faith in Berlin, before the head of the Muslim society there, is confirmed by the researcher Martin Kramer; the dialogue with the Afghan governor and the scene on the train rest on Asad's word alone. Image credits: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (no known restrictions on publication): photographs of the Prophet's Mosque and Medina, 1913–1914, from the portfolio "Bilder aus Palästina, Nord-Arabien und dem Sinai" (Berlin, 1916); James Atkinson's drawings of Afghanistan from "Sketches in Afghaunistan" (1842); photographs of Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Lemberg (1915–1926). The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Open Access, CC0): the Futuh al-Haramayn of Muhyi al-Din Lari (1678), and a manuscript Qur'an dated 1268 AH. Narration: the English narration uses an AI voice built, with his consent, from the channel presenter's own recordings. Animated scenes and sound effects are our own design. The Arabic edition of this series is on our Arabic channel, Insan al-Ma'rifa. #MuhammadAsad #TheRoadToMecca #TheKnowledgeSeeker — The Knowledge Seeker: stories of the minds and hearts that shaped human cultures. We came together to know one another and to talk, not to fight.