It was during those years in New York City that Asad reestablished connections with some of his Jewish relatives, including relatives who lived in Israel. And it was in New York that he wrote The Road to Mecca, an autobiography published by Simon and Schuster in 1954 and very positively reviewed in the leading journals and newspapers of the day. The New York Times reviewer called it an “intensely interesting and moving book.” Disillusioned with the Pakistani politics, he then made the transition to the world of Islamic scholarship, moved to Europe, and between 1964 and 1980 produced what many today deem the finest translation of the Quran into English, accompanied by an extensive scholarly commentary.
[...] And in the following year, 2012, Asad’s widow Pola Hamida (his third wife), assisted by the Pakistani scholar M. Ikram Chaghatai, published Home-coming of the Heart, a compilation of previously unpublished writing by and about Asad. Within that volume is Hamida’s memoir of the mid-1950s, the period in which Asad left the Pakistani U.N. delegation and wrote his best-selling book The Road to Mecca. Hamida notes that Asad’s political adversaries among the Pakistani elites spread the rumor that Asad, living in New York City, had “abandoned Islam and reverted to Judaism.” To clear his name of this accusation Asad wrote detailed and lengthy letters to Pakistani newspapers, where the controversy about him raged for a few months in 1954. Subsequently Asad was “exonerated” of this charge of apostasy and his good name restored.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/jew-helped-invent-islamic-state
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