My Discovery of Islam

This book tells the story of a European's discovery of Islam and of his integration within the Muslim community. Early in his life, the author started his career as a foreign correspondent for Continental newspapers and after several years of extensive travels throughout the Middle East, had become a Muslim in 1926. After his conversion to Islam he lived for nearly six years in Arabia, and after leaving Arabia he went to India and met the great Muslim poet-philosopher and spiritual father of the Pakistan idea, Muhammad Iqbal. Continuing the narrative, the author writes: It was he who persuaded me to give up my plans of traveling to Easter Turkestan, China and Indonesia and to remain in India to help elucidate the intellectual premises of the future Islamic state which was then hardly more than a dream in Iqbal's visionary mind. To me, as to Iqbal, this dream represented a way, indeed the only way, to a revival of all the dormant hopes of Islam, the creation of a political entity of people bound together not by common descent but by their common adherence to an ideology. For years I devoted myself to this ideal, studying, writing and lecturing, and in time gained something of a reputation as an interpreter of Islamic law and culture.