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Wilfried Hofmann, German Social Scientist and Diplomat (part 1 of 2)
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Description: The story of how a German diplomat and ambassador to Algeria accepted Islam. Part 1.
By Wilfried Hofmann
Published on 16 Jan 2006 - Last modified on 21 Dec 2008
Viewed: 7986 (daily average: 6) - Rating: 4 out of 5 - Rated by: 4
Printed: 511 - Emailed: 3 - Commented on: 0
Category: Articles
> Stories of New Muslims
> Personalities
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_001.jpg) Ph.D (Law) Harvard. German Social Scientist and Diplomat.
Embraced Islam in 1980.
Dr. Hofmann, who accepted Islam in 1980, was
born as a Catholic in Germany in 1931. He graduated from Union College in New York and completed his legal studies at Munich University where he received a
doctorate in jurisprudence in 1957.
He became a research assistant for the reform of
federal civil procedure, and in 1960 received an LL.M. degree from Harvard Law School. He was Director of Information for NATO in Brussels from 1983 to
1987. He was posted as German ambassador to Algeria in 1987 and then to Morocco in 1990 where he served for four years. He performed umrah (Lesser Pilgrimage) in
1982 and Hajj (Pilgrimage) in 1992.
Several key experiences led Dr. Hofmann to
Islam. The first of these began in 1961 when he was posted to Algeria as Attaché in the German Embassy and found himself in the middle of the bloody
guerilla warfare between French troops and the Algerian National Front who had
been fighting for Algerian independence for the past eight years. There he
witnessed the cruelty and massacre that the Algerian population endured. Every
day, nearly a dozen people were killed – “close range, execution style” – only
for being an Arab or for speaking for the independence. “I witnessed the
patience and resilience of the Algerian people in the face of extreme
suffering, their overwhelming discipline during Ramadan, their confidence of
victory, as well as their humanity amidst misery.” He felt it was their
religion that made them so, and therefore, he started studying their religious
book – the Quran. “I have never stopped reading it, to this very day.”
Islamic art was the second experience for Dr. Hofmann
in his journey to Islam. From his early life he has been fond of art and
beauty and ballet dancing. All of these were overshadowed when he came to know
Islamic art, which made an intimate appeal to him. Referring to Islamic art,
he says: “Its secret seems to lie in the intimate and universal presence of
Islam as a religion in all of its artistic manifestations, calligraphy, space
filling arabesque ornaments, carpet patterns, mosque and housing architecture,
as well as urban planning. I am thinking of the brightness of the mosques
which banishes any mysticism, of the democratic spirit of their architectural
layout.”
“I am also thinking of the introspective
quality of the Muslim palaces, their anticipation of paradise in gardens full
of shade, fountains, and rivulet; of the intricate socially functional
structure of old Islamic urban centers (madinahs), which fosters community
spirits and transparency of the market, tempers heat and wind, and assures the
integration of the mosque and adjacent welfare center for the poor, schools and
hostels into the market and living quarters. What I experienced is so
blissfully Islamic in so many places … is the tangible effect which Islamic
harmony, the Islamic way of life, and the Islamic treatment of space leave on
both heart and mind.”
Perhaps more than all of these, what made a
significant impact on his quest for the truth, was his thorough knowledge of
Christian history and doctrines. He realized that there was a significant
difference between what a faithful Christian believes and what a professor of
history teaches at the university. He was particularly troubled by the Church’s
adoption of the doctrines established by St. Paul in preference to that of
historical Jesus. “He, who never met Jesus, with his extreme Christology
replaced the original and correct Judeo-Christian view of Jesus!”
He found it difficult to accept that mankind is
burdened with the “original sin” and that God had to have his own son tortured
and murdered on the cross in order to save his own creations. “I began to
realize how monstrous, even blasphemous it is to imagine that God could have
been fallen short in his creation; that he could have been unable to do
anything about the disaster supposedly caused by Adam and Eve without begetting
a son, only to have him sacrificed in such a bloody fashion; that God might
suffer for mankind, His creation.”
He went back to the very basic question of the
existence of God. After analyzing works of philosophers, such as Wittgenstein,
Pascal, Swinburn, and Kant, he came to an intellectual conviction of the
existence of God. The next logical question he faced was how God communicates
to human beings so that they can be guided. This led him to acknowledge the
need for revelations. But what contains the truth – Judeo-Christian scriptures
or Islam?
He found the answer to this question in his
third crucial experience when he came across the following verse of the Quran:is
verse opened up his eyes and provided the answer to his dilemma. Clearly and
unambiguously for him, it rejected the ideas of the burden of “original sin”
and the expectation of “intercession” by the saints. “A Muslim lives in a
world without clergy and without religious hierarchy; when he prays he does not
pray via Jesus, Mary, or other interceding saints, but directly to God – as a
fully emancipated believer – and this is a religion free of mysteries.” According
to Hofmann, “A Muslim is the emancipated believer par excellence.”
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Wilfried Hofmann, German Social Scientist and Diplomat (part 2 of 2)
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Description: The story of how a German diplomat and ambassador to Algeria accepted Islam. Part 2.
By Wilfried Hofmann
Published on 16 Jan 2006 - Last modified on 31 Jul 2006
Viewed: 6312 (daily average: 4) - Rating: 4.4 out of 5 - Rated by: 14
Printed: 486 - Emailed: 11 - Commented on: 0
Category: Articles
> Stories of New Muslims
> Personalities
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“I began to see Islam with its own eyes, as the
unadulterated, pristine belief in the one and only, the true God, Who does not
beget, and was not begotten, Whom nothing and nobody resembles … In place of
the qualified deism of a tribal God and the constructions of a divine Trinity,
the Quran showed me the most lucid, most straightforward, the most abstract -
thus historically most advanced – and least anthropomorphic concept of God.”
“The Quran’s ontological statements, as
well as its ethical teachings, impressed me as profoundly plausible, “as good
as gold,” so there was no room for even the slightest doubt about the
authenticity of Muhammad’s prophetic mission. People who understand human
nature cannot fail to appreciate the infinite wisdom of the “Dos and Don’ts”
handed down from God to man in the form of the Quran.”
For his son’s upcoming 18th birthday in 1980, he
prepared a 12-page manuscript containing the things that he considered
unquestionably true from a philosophical perspective. He asked a Muslim Imam
of Cologne named Muhammad Ahmad Rassoul to take a look at the work. After
reading it, Rassoul remarked that if Dr. Hofmann believed in what he had
written, then he was a Muslim! That indeed became the case a few days later
when he declared “I bear witness that there is no divinity besides God, and I
bear witness that Muhammad is God’s messenger.” That was September 25, 1980.
Dr. Hofmann continued his professional career as
a German diplomat and NATO officer for fifteen years after he became Muslim. “I
did not experience any discrimination in my professional life”, he said. In
1984, three and half years after his conversion, then German President Dr. Carl
Carstens awarded him the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. The
German government distributed his book “Diary of a German Muslim” to all German
foreign missions in the Muslim countries as an analytical tool. Professional
duties did not prevent him from practicing his religion.
Once very artistic about red wine, he would now
politely refuse offers of alcohol. As a Foreign Service officer, he
occasionally had to arrange working lunch for foreign guests. He would be
participating in those luncheons with an empty plate in front of him during
Ramadan. In 1995, he voluntarily resigned from the Foreign Service to dedicate
himself to Islamic causes.
While discussing the evils caused by alcohol in
individual and social life, Dr. Hofmann mentioned an incident in his own life
caused by alcohol. During his college years in New York in 1951, he was once
traveling from Atlanta to Mississippi. When he was in Holy Spring, Mississippi all on a sudden a vehicle, apparently driven by a drunken driver, appeared in
front of his car. A serious accident followed, taking away nineteen of his
teeth and disfiguring his mouth.
After undergoing surgery on his chin and lower
hip, the hospital surgeon comforted him saying: “Under normal circumstances, no
one survives an accident like that. God has something special in mind for you,
my friend!” As he limped in Holy Spring after release from the hospital with
his “arm in a sling, a bandaged knee, an iodine-discolored, stitched-up lower
face”, he wondered what could be the meaning of the surgeon’s remark.
He came to know it one day, but much later. “Finally,
thirty years later, on the very day I professed my faith in Islam, the true
meaning of my survival became clear to me!”
A statement on his conversion:
“For some time now, striving for more and
more precision and brevity, I have tried to put on paper in a systematic way,
all philosophical truths, which, in my view, can be ascertained beyond
reasonable doubt. In the course of this effort it dawned upon me that the
typical attitude of an agnostic is not an intelligent one; that man simply
cannot escape a decision to believe; that the createdness of what exists around
us is obvious; that Islam undoubtedly finds itself in the greatest harmony with
overall reality. Thus I realize, not without shock, that step by step, in
spite of myself and almost unconsciously, in feeling and thinking I have grown
into a Muslim. Only one last step remained to be taken : to formalize my
conversion.
As of today I am a Muslim. I have arrived.
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