Islam
Nussimbaum had a romantic view of Islam, seeing it as part of the grand cultural heritage of "the East" (to which he felt connected by his Jewish heritage) and a bulwark against the evils of Western modernity and Bolshevism. Writing about his childhood in Azerbaijan, he writes about the emotional effect he received from looking at the old palaces in Baku: "I saw the broad expanse of the sandy Arabian desert, I saw the horsemen, their snow-white burnooses billowing in the wind, I saw the flocks of prophets praying towards Mecca and I wanted to be one with this wall, one with this desert, one with this incomprehensible, intricate script, one with the entire Islamic Orient, which in our Baku had been so ceremoniously carried to the grave, to the victorious drumbeats of European culture.... Throughout my entire childhood, I dreamed of the Arabic edifices every night... I do know that it was the most powerful, most formative feeling of my life."
In Berlin, he formally converted to Islam, obtaining a certificate to the effect in Berlin in August 1922. In 1924 he helped found an Islamic student group in Berlin, Islamia, where he met other Muslims—Arabs, Turks, Iranians, Afghanis and Indians as well as converts like himself—and "spoke out about the wretched situation of Muslims in the colonial world." However, some Muslims objected to the way Nussimbaum depicted Islam in his writings, accusing him of Orientalism and of not being a "real" Muslim. In 1930, Mohammed Hoffman, a member of Islamia and himself a convert to Islam, accused Nussmbaum of trying "to pass for a born Muslim" and suggesting that his conversion was merely a ploy. As a result of this and similar accusations, he stopped attending Islamia meetings; however, he never renounced Islam or distanced himself from it. In 1934 the New York Herald Tribune ran a profile of "Essad Bey" which described him as an irreverent Muslim who "carries no prayer rug; he fails to salute Mecca when he prays... eats pigs and drinks wine; yet when he came to be married in Berlin he refused to abjure his creed." Those who knew Nussimbaum in his last years in Positano reported that he kept up the comedy of being Muslim to the end. Also a scathing review of Essad Bey's biography "Mohammed" doubted that the author "had ever read the Quran, either in the original or in translation." It claimed: "Essad Bey's Mohammed is a potpourri of bad history distorted facts and naive interpretations. It should never have been written...In fact, I am impelled to go still further and state that there is hardly a page in this 'biography' which is free from error."
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