Philosophical Paths

Led The Thinker Hoffman to Islam

The Former German Ambassador Records

His Faith Journey in his Book : The Road to Makkah

Dr Murad Hoffman, the  former German ambassador, confirms that it is difficult for a person to give a detailed explanation of the motives and justifications that made him convert to Islam out of conviction after a laborious study and deep reflection. Hoffman adheres to Abi-Hamid Al-Ghazali’s school of thought in explaining the reasons for belief and its justifications, stating that it is not an easy matter for a person to present a bank statement and evaluation of his intellectual development.

When I met Hoffman in Chicago and explained to him that I was preparing a book about new Muslims, he liked the idea and talked to me about important aspect of his spiritual journey. He asked me to refer to his book The Road of Makkah in which he recorded his faith journey to Islam.

Hoffman said : “Only a few days elapsed before I announced my conversion to Islam on September 25, 1980, and it is not easy for a person to present a bank statement and an evaluation of his intellectual development. Herman Hesse wrote in one of his novellas, namely Klein und Wagner in 1919: “Talking is the surest way to misunderstanding everything and rendering it shallow and barren”. He also warns in his Novel, The Game of Crystal Balls, against formulating internal meaning in words, for he says through the Maestro :  “Show awe to meaning, but don’t suppose it teachable”. Many great figures have failed in this endeavour. The strong ‘Umar, the second Orthodox Khalif, had been persecuting Muslims before he embraced Islam. It is impossible to really understand the way he unexpectedly got convinced of the truth of Islam after reading Surat Thaha following his dispute with his sister.” Hoffman quotes in this respect the confessions of Abi-Hamid Al-Ghazali (11th and 12th centuries A.D.) : “Faith did not enter his mind through one clear piece of evidence by itself, but through an innumerable number of reasons for faith and of accompanying experiences and situations whose details can be mentioned.” He finally said : “My reversion to Islam was a result of ‘a light Allah threw into my bosom’”.

In his wonderful book, The Road to Makkah, Hoffman deals with his conversion to Islam, describing it as if it were a “blow from Heaven” that struck him. He says : “As to me, I was, for years, rather for decades, attracted to Islam like a magnet because I was accustomed to its ideas, as if I had lived in it before. I had been led to this path by three main events of a humanistic, aesthetic and artistic, and philosophical nature. The first of these events was extraordinarily associated with Algeria. For in 1960, I spent two months in Chateau-Neuf-sur- Loire so as to perfect my French in preparation for the acceptance exams in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There, I daily read the French media’s reports on the Algerian war.”

Hoffman continued : “In the acceptance exam in the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, every candidate had to give a five minutes talk on a subject randomly, chosen by the Jury and given to the candidate ten minutes in advance. I was very surprised when I learnt that the topic of the talk was about ‘The Algerian Issue’. The reason for my surprise was my extensive knowledge of this subject and not my ignorance of it. Some months after the exam and a short time before leaving for Geneva, the training supervisor told me when we met by chance while having a meal that my destination had been changed to Algeria. During my work in Algiers in the years 1961-62, I witnessed the state of war which lasted for eight years between the French occupying forces and the Algerian National Liberation Front. During my stay there, a third party joined the war ; it was the ‘Secret Army Organisation’ which was a French terrorist organisation consisting of rebel settlers and soldiers. A day did not elapse without the killing of a large number of people in the streets of Algiers. More often than not, they were killed by shooting at the back of the head from a small distance. There was no reason for that except that they were Arabs or in favour of the independence of Algeria. Whenever I heard shots of a machine gun, I phoned my American wife to hurry to buy all that she needed, because the following attack in the area would not take place before twenty minutes.”

“My noblest mission was to send back home the deserting German members of the Foreign Legion with the help of  the French authorities. The number of these poor romantics was not small, after the desertion of the commander of the Parachute Forces the year before. They were greatly attracted by death. The Secret Army Organization recruited a number of them in Special Forces (commandoes), hence finding themselves between two fires. Their chances of not getting killed were very small, indeed. As a representative of the German Consulate General, I used to lay flowers on the graves of many of them. While looking for Germans among the wounded in hospital, I carried a gun ready for use. I used to scrutinize the face of anyone I met and even his hands. When we came face to face, each one of us went backward, asking for peace. Sometimes, my frightened wife insisted on protecting my back, thus she walked some steps behind me, carrying a sharp knife under her sleeve.”

Hoffman recalls some of his past experiences saying : “Some of those days’ reminiscences still make me sad even today. While on my way to the headquarters of the radio station France 5, where it was planned that I would give a lecture on ‘the State of Theatrical Dance’ in Germany, on the orders of the Consul General, the fuel pump of my VW Beetle broke down in Izli Street, which was narrow and full of curves. Soon after, a long line of cars formed behind my car and the noise of their hooters filled the air. At that moment, a man was crossing the street in front of me ; another man shot at him from the opposite pavement; the former fell down before the left fender of my car ; the attacker wove to me with his gun, asking me to move on so as to let him shoot at the man. I did not like that, nor could I do it, either. Finally, the attacker drew nearer to the wounded man and shot at him again, thus killing him ; then he disappeared in the crowd calmly and slowly. Similarly, I was also indignant when I was forced to see members of the Secret Army Organization setting fire to cars they had previously loaded with fuel barrels ; and then pushing them from the top of a slope to a district inhabited by Arabs. A person could expect to be on the killing list if he were an unwanted witness. My hairdresser in Al-Abiyar knew this very well. When the Secret Army Organisation forces attacked the post office opposite his shop in Galini Street, he turned his chair so as not to witness what was going on. His act was not less surprising than that of a policeman who offered to keep up an eye on my car in 1962 while his office in Al-Abiyar just behind his back was on fire.

When, President Charles De Gaulle reached an agreement with the Provisional Government of the Algerian Liberation Front in Evian in 1962 to cease fire the following July, the Secret Army Organization multiplied their terrorist acts so as to provoke Algerians to break the agreement. Its members started to kill young Algerian academics ; they also shot women who wore the Hijab. A few days before independence, they shot at the last Algerian peddler in Al-Abiar and killed him directly in front of my office. This peddler had spent his life selling fish for many decades, without ever hurting anybody. In the street where I lived, my French neighbours threw from their windows on the victors all the things they did not grudge. The frozen things they threw fell on garbage piles that had been lying there for weeks, which was fortunate for rats.

These sad events constituted the background for my first close-contact with how real Islam is lived on a daily basis. I noticed the Algerians’ endurance of their sufferings, their strong commitment in Ramadan, their belief in victory and their human conduct in the midst of hardship. I realized that their religion played a role in all this. I became aware of their humanity in its truest shape when my wife had a miscarriage under the effect of the ‘events’ taking place then. She started to bleed after midnight, and the ambulance could not come before 6 a.m. as a result of the curfew and of the catchword : ‘Killing without warning’ that was prevalent then. At six o’clock, while looking from the window of my flat on the fourth floor, I realized that the ambulance could not find us because the Secret Army Organisation had changed the names of all the streets of the district I lived in that night, using new names such as ‘Salan’, ‘Yahud’ and ‘The Secret Army Organisation’.

After a long delay, we were on our way to Dr Shimon’s clinic (just a little time before it was blown up by the Secret Army Organisation) when we came across a checkpoint of the Republican Organization for Security. In spite of the noise of hooters the driver had recourse to, he made very slow progress. My wife thought at that time that she would lose consciousness so she informed me about her blood group which was O, RH- , in case of emergency. The Algerian driver, who heard her, offered to give some of his blood which was of the same blood type. Here is an Arab Muslim donating his blood, in the midst of war, to save a foreign non-Muslim woman. In order to know how these amazing, original inhabitants think and behave, I started reading their “Book” – The Holy Qur’an in its French translation by Pelse Tijani, and I have not stopped reading it since that time. Until then, I did not have any knowledge of the Qur’an except through the open windows of the Qur’anic schools in Mzab south of Algiers, where Berber children learn the Qur’an and read it in a language foreign to them, which astonished me a lot. Later, I realized that learning and reading the Holy Qur’an, as a direct message of Allah, was an obligation in all conditions. I was embarrassed by the angry reaction of an Algerian when I told him about my reading of the Qur’an in the bar room of the Trans Mediterranean Hotel in Ghardaya. For he clearly disapproved of the existence of translations of the Holy Qur’an, considering any attempt to translate Allah’s Word to another language as blasphemy. I understood his reaction a short time later. For the Arabic language contains words that do not refer to a precise time, for words which refer to a definite future can also refer to something that happened in the past, too. Suffice it to say that Arabic contains some elements that an Arab can understand by implication. In addition to this, there is the usual problem which lies in the fact that words which have the same meaning in two languages are not congruous in terms of mental associations except in very few cases. Therefore, any translation of the Qur’an is no more than an interpretation which impoverishes meaning and deprives it of its content. Thus, the man in the bar was in the right.

This Algeria, to which I owe a lot, does not want to leave me alone. It follows me like fate. When Switzerland was looking after our interests in Algeria in 1966, I had to keep permanent contact from the German embassy in Bern with those who remained in our diplomatic mission in Algeria, through the political office of the Swiss embassy. The mail sent from Bonn to Algiers went through me every week. Twenty five years after my first job in Algeria, I returned to it as ambassador in 1987. Since then, I have been appointed ambassador in Morocco -a neighbour of Algeria- in 1990, the image of Algeria, which still undergoes too many sufferings, rarely goes out of my mind. Was all this a mere coincidence ?”

Hoffman continued : “What led me to Islam too was an important experience of aesthetic nature related to Islamic art. This experience has a story which can be summed up in the fact that I am ‘fascinated by beauty’ ; since my childhood I have been attracted by the formal aspect of beauty and longing to dive into its depths even when my mother-in-law says, according to Puritanism, that beauty is a superficial matter and no more than a make-believe on the surface. In 1951, when I received the first part of the excellence grant offered to the “most gifted” by the Ministry of Culture in Bavaria, I spent it all on buying a copy of Paul Gauguin’s painting “a Girl with a Mango Fruit” printed on a piece of jute. Because I was not living in Maximilianeum District located on the right side of Isar River, I rather lived in the lodgings of the Revolutionary Democrats, near Masmann Square, whose rooms were shared by workers and students, I took the painting to my room and started analysing it. Soon afterwards I was convinced that motionless art-painting, sculpture, architecture, calligraphy and small artistic works- depend in their aesthetic effect on static motion ; thus, it is derived from dancing. This is why our feeling of the beauty of impressionism increases with the growth of the latter’s capacity for giving an impression of motion. This is what explains my fascination with dancing, which made me see all the ballet presentations in Prins Regenten Theatre in Munich. From that time onwards my interest in dancing has increased. It has widened to include all that is associated with dancing. I used to spend all my free hours between the court’s appointments in opera houses, near the court. I took some ballet lessons so as to learn -though in a less developed way- classical ballet dancing with a view to knowing what I was writing about. This fine art eventually relies on extraordinary physical effort. This is also how I learnt, for instance the difference between various movements and the ways they were performed.

The ballet school I liked most was the Russian one of Lenavon Zaknuvski, who lived in exile. This school had many excellent students among whom was Angela Albrecht, and it was from among its students that the Zaknuvski Ballet Company was founded in the mid 1950’s. It was through it that we presented good ballet performances in Munich and in other towns in Bavaria. I was in charge of contacts, advertising, lighting and the make-up unit. In 1955, I founded in Munich in collaboration with Karl Victor Princh Tsufid, the Society of the Friends of Ballet and we were in charge of the dancing criticism column of the Munich Evening Newspaper.”

Hoffman said, too : “The following stages of my life were, in brief, as follows : I worked between 1954 and 1980 as a ballet critic in different German, British and American newspapers, and as a lecturer in the history and aesthetics of the ballet at Cologne’s Institute for Ballet between 1971 and 1973. I wrote memorandums to the German Culture minister on the foundation of a German national ballet. Some of my acquaintances did not know that law and diplomacy were my two main occupations, and not the ballet. My favourite book was that of Gilbert Weckongs on the history of aesthetics as a philosophical science. As an ardent admirer of the ballet -that abstract art which embodies music- I was actually looking for the reasons which make us feel the beauty of things or specific movements. This is the reason why I used to spend long weeks in one of Bavaria’s forests in quest of the foundations of the aesthetics of movement. There I learnt that we -as human beings- could only feel the beauty of the healthy human body and the elements that are congruous with its standards. This also applies to us as visual analysts of the images and types produced by nature. In addition to this, we read images in the very direction that we write. I finally learnt that movements monopolize our attention because of the dangers that they may contain. Eventually, it became evident to me that we admire centrifugal movements because we can imagine them stretching into infinity. It is through this road that Islamic art has become for me an important experience with an extraordinary and high value. Does it not totally resemble in its tranquillity what I enjoyed in the abstract ballet movement : human capacity, internal motion and extension into infinity, and all this within the context of the spiritualism which is characteristic of Islam ?

I have been inspired by architectural works such as Al-Hambra in Granada, the Great Mosque in Cordoba, which are certainly the product of a refined civilisation ; I really understood what Reynart Maria Relca wrote after his visit to Cordoba’s cathedral : “…Since my visit to Cordoba, I have been filled with a savage enmity to Christianity. I read the Qur’an which is embodied in me in a voice that engulfs me with an oppressive force, and I burst into it the way the wind bursts in the organ”.

Islamic art has become for me an aesthetic home, as classical ballet was for me in the past. I have started to see the ages’ works of art -the Greek, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance and Rococo ones- as impressive, deep-rooted, authentic and ingenious, but they do not penetrate into me, nor do they affect my feelings and emotions.”