Muhammad Asad’s autobiographical account The Road to Mecca (1954) is a fine work that moves between various genres, including historical narration, adventure tale and conversion story, presenting numerous entertaining anecdotes. More intriguing, however, is the unique and fascinatingly nuanced insight that Asad (formerly Leopold Weiss), gives into a soulless and lost Europe of the early twentieth century juxtaposed by his discovery of a strikingly different world. This was a world which had preserved a connection to the Divine throughout spheres in human life, predominantly infused by Islam, i.e. the lands which are now widely known as the MENA region. Continue reading Lessons on the Pitfalls of Modernity in ‘The Road to Mecca’