From Jewish Effeminacy to Muslim Masculinity: Muhammad Asad's Road to Mecca

From Jewish Effeminacy to Muslim MasculinityMuhammad Asad's Road to Mecca Yeshua G. B. Tolle (bio) What did it mean to "exit" Judaism a century ago in Europe? You might have converted or attempted another kind of radical assimilation.1 But exiting Judaism wasn't the same as leaving Jewishness behind. The former a baptism could accomplish; the latter required you to renegotiate your relationship to the idea of the Jew in the European imaginary. For Jews and Christians alike, that idea emerged from national, economic, public health, and racial discourses, which figured Jews as other and aberrant.2 Any exiter from Judaism was marked by these discourses. As a key producer of difference in the modern European imaginary, the sex/gender system in particular influenced Jewish experiences of exit. When western Europe underwent "an age of gender crisis" at the turn of the twentieth century—gender non/conformity assuming heightened significance—social undesirables, like Jews, were scapegoated as gender and sexual deviants.3 Ideologues dissected their dress, features, and habits to caricature them as perverse, even dangerous. "The Jew is a frightening reminder that the categories by which the culture confidently asserts the naturalness and knowability of gender and sexuality have no reliable boundaries," observes Lori Lefkowitz.4 This same historical moment witnessed genuine efforts to reimagine the gender binary. Here, too, Jews had End Page 147 outsized significance; they were embraced, feared, and fetishized by artists and intellectuals as symbols of gender nonconformity.5 Yet while some Jewish aesthetes and arts patrons dissented from normative gender roles and performance, most prominent Jewish intellectuals embraced or adapted prevailing masculinities and femininities. In fine, Jews who wanted to exit Judaism, and leave their Jewishness behind, needed also to deal with the gender of it all. Several authors in this special section approach the topic of comparative ex-religion from a personal perspective. As a literary scholar, I follow suit by examining an autobiography, the form of writing most closely tied to narratives of exit and transition from Saint Augustine to Leslie Feinberg, thus highlighting a generic dimension of the personal. Admittedly, the intellectual, theological, and social-critical dimensions of religious exit frequently assume greater importance in literary perspective (especially when the subject is male) than sexed and gendered ones. Along these lines, Naomi Seidman remarks: "The gendered assumptions that govern both Orthodox and secular discourses of exit … maintain that men leave the traditional Jewish world on a philosophical journey while constraining girls and women to a departure that is widely understood … as a sexual passage."6 In Muhammad Asad's The Road to Mecca (1954), a fascinating and underappreciated twentieth-century conversion narrative, I find an opportunity to reverse the usual pattern and foreground gender in our reading of a male writer's exit narrative. Asad's narrative constructs a new masculinity, I argue, to banish the specter of Jewish femininity. His philosophical journey is also and no less a gendered one. Born Leopold Weiss in Czernowitz in 1900, Asad was a Pakistani diplomat, Qur'an translator, and best-selling autobiographer. Road uses the frame narrative of a desert trek to Mecca in 1932 to detail, in flashbacks, his transformation from an Austrian Jewish, would-be bohemian intellectual to a Muslim-convert Middle East reporter and confidant of the Saudi royal family. Strong sales and warm critical reception notwithstanding, the book is now hard to find on Anglophone bookshelves, while in the Islamic world Asad's works remain bestsellers. Although critical studies and appreciations have appeared, much remains to be said about this singular figure in recent comparative religious history.7 To make sense of Asad's re/presentation of gender, we need to understand Jews' responses to dominant portrayals of Jewish gender, particularly the antisemitic stereotype—and, as we will see, counternormative masculinity—of Jewish male effeminacy. While normative Jewish thought often replicated prevalent gender anxieties, it vigorously combated the stereotype of Jewish male effeminacy, End Page 148 and the related charge that Jewish men were "unfit for citizenship," "a threat to the nation's health."8 This anxiety-cum-combativeness achieved a notable formulation in Max Nordau's "muscular Judaism," which aimed to redeem Jewish maleness with...