Personalities

Acknowledged by many players as the greatest basketball player of all time, voted six times the National Basketball Association’s most valuable player, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is also one of the most visible Muslims in the American public arena.  The 7’ 2”native upper Harlem, born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, starred for UCLA before entering the National Basketball Association […]

If you were being interrogated by the Taleban as a suspected US spy, it might be hard to imagine a happy ending. But for journalist Yvonne Ridley, the ordeal in Afghanistan led her to convert to a religion she says is “the biggest and best family in the world”. The formerly hard-drinking Sunday school teacher

I needed a refuge.  I had fallen in love with Jamaica, if it is possible to fall in love with a place, and I hated Egypt simply because it was not Jamaica.  Where were my Blue Mountains, my tropical sea, my beautiful West Indian girls? How could I ever have left the only place that

He was right, and I faced, as I had done in Leo Myers’ case and have done on many occasions since then, the extraordinary contradictions in human nature and, above all, the gulf that often separates the writer setting down his ideas on paper from the same man in his personal life.  Whereas the aim

When I left the army I began to write, needing to express my thoughts as a way of putting them in order.  I wrote about Vedanta, Taoism and Zen Buddhism, but also about certain Western writers (including Leo Myers) who had been influenced by these doctrines.  Through a chance meeting with the poet T. S.

From Charterhouse I went on to Cambridge, where I neglected my official studies, which seemed trivial and boring, in favor of the only study that mattered.  The year was 1939.  War had broken out just before I had gone up to the University and, in two years time, I would be in the army.  It

Where should I seek for knowledge? By the time I was 15, I had discovered that there was something called ‘philosophy’ and that the word meant ‘love of wisdom’.  Wisdom was what I sought, so the satisfaction of my need must lie hidden in these heavy books written by wise men.  With a feeling of

I was born in Switzerland of British parents, a child of war.  At the time of my birth, the final peace treaty ending the first world war, the treaty with Turkey, was being signed close by in Lausanne.  The greatest tempest which had changed the face of the world had temporarily exhausted itself, but its

In 1922 I left my native country, Austria, to travel through Africa and Asia as a Special Correspondent to some of the leading Continental newspapers, and spent from that year onward nearly the whole of my time in the Islamic East. My interest in the nations with which I came into contact was in the

Muhammad Asad was born Leopold Weiss in July 1900 in the city of Lvov (German Lemberg), now in Poland, then part of the Austrian Empire. He was the descendant of a long line of rabbis, a line broken by his father, who became a barrister. Asad himself received a thorough education that would qualify him