Muḥammad Asad (1900-92) was a Muslim intellectual of Jewish descent and one of the most prominent European converts to Islam in the twentieth century. Born Leopold Weiss in Lvov (Lemberg, then under Austrian rule) on 2 July 1900, he was given a religious education, despite his parents' indifference to Judaism. After a brief period studying philosophy and art history at Vienna University, he moved to Berlin in 1920, where he led a Bohemian life until he began work as a journalist. During a stay in Palestine in 1922, he