The term Mecca constitutes a central motif in the autobiographical book The Road to Mecca, published in New York in 1954, by the Jewish journalist Leopold Weiss (1900–1992, after 1926: Muhammad Asad), who grew up in Habsburg Galicia. In it, Weiss covers not only his conversion to Islam, which he underwent in 1926 in Berlin and again in Cairo in the following year, but also the life experiences that brought him to Mecca in 1927. Weiss’s The Road to Mecca is representative of all t…