'''Мухаммед Ассад''' или '''Мухаммад Асад''' (урождённый '''Леопольд Вайс''') (Пакистана в раввина, после принятия в Германии ислама принял имя Мухаммед Ассад.

Леопольд Вайс родился в Львове в семье известного еврейского адвоката Карла Вайса. Его дедом был раввин из Черновиц, старейшина одной из наиболее уважаемых раввинских династий.

В 13-летнем возрасте Леопольд свободно ориентируется в Мишны и Гемары. Вместе с отцом часто посещает Вену и Альпах, бывает на Северном и Балтийском морях.

После Первой мировой войны семья Вайсов переехала в Вену. Леопольд поступает на отделение истории искусств Венского университета, хотя большую часть времени проводит не на занятиях, а в венских кафе.

Когда Леопольду исполнилось двадцать лет, он покинул родительский дом и уехал в журналистом. Некоторое время он работает ассистентом известного кинорежиссёра Мурнау, после чего переходит на работу в одно из берлинских информационных агентств. Длительное время он не может проявить себя, однако, когда в Берлин приезжает жена Горького, ему удаётся встретиться с ней и взять интервью.

Весной Иерусалима от своего дяди Дориана Фейгенбаума, врача местной психиатрической клиники, одного из первых студентов Зигмунда Фрейда, с предложением приехать к нему в гости и некоторое время пожить в городе.

{{Infobox_Person 
| name        = Muhammad Asad
| residence   = Spain
| image       =
| imagesize   = 175px
| birth_name  = Leopold Weiss
| birth_date  = July 1900
| birth_place = Lviv, Ukraine (previously Lwów, Poland)
| death_date  = 1992
| death_place = Spain
| death_cause = 
| occupation  = Writer
| spouse = Paola Hameeda Asad
| religion    = Islam (previously Judaism)
}}

'''Muhammad Asad''' (born '''Leopold Weiss''' in July 1900 in what was then Polish Lwów in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Lviv in Ukraine; died 1992) was a Jew who converted to Islam and later served as one of the first Pakistani ambassadors to the United Nations.

==Biography==
Asad was a descendant of a long line of Hebrew from an early age and was also familiar with Aramaic. He studied the Old Testament, as well as the text and commentaries of the Talmud, the Mishna and Gemara. Furthermore, he delved into the intricacies of Biblical exegesis, the Targum.

After abandoning university in Vienna, Asad (or Weiss, as he was then called) had drifted aimlessly around 1920s Germany, even working briefly for the expressionist film director Fritz Lang. By his own account after selling a jointly written film-script, he blew the windfall on a wild party at an expensive Berlin restaurant, in the spirit of the times. He got his first journalism published through sheer ''chutzpah'' while working as a telephone operator for an American news agency in Berlin. Using the simple expedient of ringing up her Berlin hotel room, he obtained an exclusive interview with the visiting wife of the Russian author Maxim Gorky, and the story was taken up by his employers. 

Weiss later moved to the British Mandate of Palestine, staying in Jerusalem at the house of an uncle, the psychoanalyst Dorian Weiss. He picked up work as a stringer for the Frankfurter Zeitung, selling articles on a freelance basis. His pieces were noteworthy for their understanding of Arab fears and grievances against the  Zionist project. Eventually contracted as a full-time foreign correspondent for the paper, his assignments led him to an ever deepening engagement with Islam, which after much thought led to his religious conversion in 1926. He spoke of Islam thus:
<blockquote>"Islam appears to me like a perfect work of architecture. All its parts are harmoniously conceived to complement and support each other; nothing is superfluous and nothing lacking; and the result is a structure of absolute balance and solid composure."</blockquote>His travels and sojourns through Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran (he wrote many insightful articles on Shiism), and also Afghanistan and the southern Soviet Republics, were viewed with great suspicion by the Colonial Powers. One English diplomat in Saudi Arabia described him in a report as a "Bolshevik", and it is true that he took a close interest in the many liberation movements that were active at this time with the aim of freeing Muslim lands from colonial rule. He ended up in India where he met and worked alongside Muhammad Iqbal, the poet-philosopher, who had proposed the idea of an independent Muslim state in India, which later became Pakistan. 

During WWII he was interned there by the British as an enemy alien. His parents meanwhile, were murdered by the Nazis in the Pakistani Foreign Ministry from 1949 till the early 1950s. Towards the end of his life, he moved to Spain and lived there with his second wife, Paola Hameeda Asad, until his death.

Asad wrote several books, and a biography of his early life has been published in German, ''Arabic and on the authoritative classical commentaries. It has been acclaimed as one of the best, if not the best, translations of the Quran into English, although it has been criticised by some traditionalists for its Mutazilite leanings. He also wrote a translation and commentary on the ''Sahih Bukhari'', the most authoritative collection of Hadith. In addition, he wrote ''This Law of Ours'' where he sums up his views on Islamic law and rejects decisively the notion of taqlid, or strict judicial precedent which has been accepted as doctrine by most Muslim sects except the Salafis. He also makes a plea for rationalism and plurality in Islamic law, which he sees as the true legacy of the salaf or earliest generations of Muslims. In his book ''Islam at the Crossroads'', he outlines his view that the Muslim world must make a choice between living by its own values and morality or accepting those of the West, in which case, they would always lag behind the West, which had had more time to adjust to those values and mores, and would end up compromising their own religion and culture. There are some playfully cryptic references to him in the recent bestseller ''The Orientalist'' by Tom Reiss (Random House 2005), and some slightly more sinister ones in the English translations of W.G. Sebald.

He is father of Talal Asad, anthropologist specializing in religious studies and postcolonialism.

==Works==
*''Road to Mecca''
*''The Message of The Qur'an''
*Translation and commentary on the ''Sahih Bukhari''
*''This Law of Ours''
*''Islam at the Crossroads''