The Soldier Who Became Shah: Iran Through a European's Eyes 100 Years Ago | The Road to Mecca (9)

In a palm grove by Medina, Muhammad Asad receives a letter with the stamp of Tehran, from his old friend Ali Agha. And memory carries him back to Persia before he became a Muslim: a blind Baluch singer in an orange grove, the silent desert of Dasht-e Lut, a night when the telegraph wire was lost in the dark, the bazaar of Tehran, and a soldier who became Shah. 00:00 "He has found the wires" 00:13 Opening 00:36 The city of the Prophet, peace be upon him 00:58 Why Mecca now? 01:28 Ali Agha 01:57 The blind singer 02:24 The first silence 02:54 The night of the lost wire 04:11 The bazaar and the soldier 04:46 The sad eyes 05:34 Closing Join the conversation in the comments. Answer yes or no: 1. Had Muhammad Asad already become a Muslim when he travelled in Iran? 2. Before his rise, was Reza Khan a soldier in the Persian Cossack Brigade? 3. Did Asad himself hear the hum of the wind in the telegraph wire that night? Source: Muhammad Asad, The Road to Mecca (1954), Chapter Nine, "Persian Interlude." 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: everything here is from Asad's own account in his book, and the dialogues are from his memory about thirty years later. Asad lived in Iran from about 1924 to 1926 as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, that is, before he became a Muslim. "The memory of a Jewish child from Lemberg meets the sorrow of a Muslim people in Tehran" is our reading, not his words. Asad's impressions of the Iranians and his explanation of the sorrow of the mourning gatherings are his own views, and we do not adopt them; the Arabic translator commented that these are points of view on which others may not agree with him. We deliberately chose not to present his explanation, or the text of the elegy he quotes, out of respect for Shia and Sunni viewers alike. The night of the wire and the joke about the horses rest on Asad's word alone. Image credits: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Open Access, CC0): photographs of Tehran, Shiraz and Damghan (1850–1860) by Luigi Pesce; 16th-century Persian miniatures; the Futuh al-Haramayn of Muhyi al-Din Lari (1678); a painting by Charles de Coubertin (1850); Edward John Poynter's engraving "By the Rivers of Babylon"; and a photograph of a palm grove by Maxime Du Camp (1849–1850) in the wind scene. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (no known restrictions on publication): photographs of Medina, 1913–1914, from the portfolio "Bilder aus Palästina, Nord-Arabien und dem Sinai" (Berlin, 1916). The Nafud (1914): Gertrude Bell Archive, Newcastle University. 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.