If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

by Carla Power

It felt a trifle presumptuous, lecturing Indians on blending cultures and tolerating disparate faiths. The South Asian zealots who call for an India ruled by “Hindu” values, or for a “pure” Islam, ignore the subcontinent’s long history of cultural mix.

Central Asians, Arabs, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and British—all came to trade and rule, and India managed to find room enough for all of their cultural influences. During its more confident periods, South Asian Islam was expansive and open, absorbing influences from both West and East. Centuries of living alongside Hindus had fostered a Muslim culture of saints and shrines, flowering alongside orthodox madrasas. The Muslim emperor Akbar had even designed a syncretic faith of his own, the Din-i-Ilahi, which aimed to braid together the best elements of South Asia’s various religions. Even Urdu, the language of South Asian Muslims, is a blend of Arabic, Hindi, and Persian. One reason the Sheikh was so comfortable with the world, I suspected, was that the world had always come to India.

Much of the rot occurred under European colonial rule, when Islamic seminaries were deemed relics from a premodern age, holding back progress and the spread of Christian values. With the dilapidation of traditional madrasa learning came the erosion of adab, or intellectual etiquette. By the late twentieth century, measured moderation was all too often drowned out by the shrill certainty of radicals.

I was incongruous at the madrasa but was beginning to enjoy it. I like being the odd one out, having learned long ago the profoundly relaxing properties of being spectacularly out of place. Whether you’re the new kid in the fifth grade, or the only woman to have delivered a speech at Jamdahan’s madrasa, little is expected of you, and most lapses are forgiven. Like my father before me, I feel most at home when I’m away from it, freed from the expectations of my own culture. My father knew the principle of outsiderdom well. Indeed, a lifetime of being the odd man out helped draw him to the Muslim world.

eccentricities. In St. Louis, his persona made him eccentric. In Asia, it was only his culture that rendered him a curiosity.

I had watched President Bush on television assuring America that we were attacked because “they hate our freedoms.” But the very question was misguided: everywhere I went in the Muslim world, our freedoms weren’t hated, but envied. The bitterness was not aimed at Americans, or our democratic values, as Bush claimed. It was at our callous misuse of power, our continued willingness to prop up dictatorships in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia that denied their people the very democracy we purported to want to spread. It wasn’t “us” they hated, but our policies.

Like many village customs, “they are traditions not done from religious knowledge, but to build their identity as a group.”

If you’re going to change people’s minds, you can’t start from the village.” Changing tradition, like putting in electricity or running water, needed the right infrastructure.

existentialism. “Nadwah basically wanted to teach its students to think,” he said. “At most other madrasas, it’s not thinking, it’s just copying.”

Like her father, Sumaiya believed that everyone has the right to make individual choices. But like him, she was conscious that people needed limits, and she was skeptical about the culture of individualism that dominates Western life. It starts so early, she marveled: “Even in nursery, in Show and Tell, there’s a sense of ‘Look what I’ve got.’ There’s all this emphasis on the fact that it’s your thing and you’re showing it off.” I’d never thought of Show and Tell as baby’s first building block of individualism, but seen through Sumaiya’s eyes, it suddenly seemed like an early foray into the culture of the self. The monogrammed towels, vanity license plates, and sloganeering tote bags would follow—a lifelong parade displaying one’s own distinctiveness. If Western culture has the laudable goals of speaking up and standing out, these values also bring collateral damage: the cult of personalization.

For Sumaiya, the incident showed the chasm between the Western secular worldview and her own. She was puzzled by anyone who thought they had a sense of ownership over their own fate, or even absolute ownership over their own body. Everything belonged to Allah.

Spending time with the Sheikh and his family, I was struck at how grateful they were for small things, and how often. In Sumaiya and her sisters, I saw none of the vague dissatisfaction I’d seen flourish around me—indeed, in me, growing up. As a member of the American middle class, I was raised in a nation of strivers, a nation founded on the right to pursue happiness. Our discontent was productive. It got things done. The drive to do better propelled you through graduate school and up career ladders. Through spin classes and salary negotiations. A world of infinite favors didn’t yield reliable results. My secularist’s do-it-yourself existence did not get me into the habit of being grateful for date palms, fragrant herbs, and seas. The Sheikh’s sense of gratitude was altogether more muscular, perhaps because it had somewhere to go. His consciousness of God as a creator took gratitude to a whole new level, cosmic in scope and near-constant in presence.

“Muslim women are in the same situation. There could have been so many Miltons.”

A top Islamic scholar, an inspiration to champions of women’s rights, a military commander riding on camelback, and a fatwa-issuing jurist, Aisha stretched the role of Leader’s Wife far beyond the usual job description of comeliness and decorum. By the standards of both our own time and hers, Aisha’s intellectual standing and religious authority were astonishing. She knew it, too. Ten things, she said, set her apart from her co-wives. An excerpt from an early Islamic account of her words: “He did not marry any other virgin but me … The revelation would come to him while he was with me, and it did not come down when he was with any of his wives except me. Allah took his soul while he was against my chest.”

it is Aisha who shimmers, lifelike, on the pages of the early Muslim histories. Her voice carries across the centuries, preserved in 2,210 hadiths. And what a voice: bell-clear and courageous, one can hear it, should one we choose to listen, pronouncing on Islamic traditions on matters from prayer to trade to sex. That we know so much more about Aisha than Khadija comes down to timing: most of Khadija’s life predated Islam, so it was not chronicled with the same care as Aisha’s. Born four years after Muhammad’s first revelation, Aisha grew up while the verses of the Quran were descending on the Prophet. We are privy to extraordinary details of his youngest wife over the course of her sixty-odd-year life: her penchant for wearing safflower red, her gift for poetry, her knowledge of medicine. We hear accounts of her spirited debates with other intellectual luminaries, and her fatwas on topics ranging from breast-feeding to inheritance. After the Prophet’s death, her fatwas were highly respected, pronouncements that remain crucial to Islamic law to this day.

Some fourteen hundred years on, Aisha remains not just a role model but a red-blooded human, at once laudable and yet reassuringly flawed. We see her giving away the last scrap of food in her house—a grape—to a beggar, but we also hear her jealousy of her co-wives.

Reading about Aisha—how she’d fret over the Prophet staying out too long in the sun, or how she’d recite scores of poetry verses from memory—I was exultant. So much of Aisha’s life closed the gap between Islamic traditions of womanhood and my own feminist sensibilities. In Aisha we find a woman, and a woman’s interpretations, at the core of a religious tradition. “Take half your religion from Humayra [the Little Rosy One],” Muhammad advised his Companions, using his nickname for the fair-skinned Aisha.

For Leila Ahmed, in her authoritative book Women and Gender in Islam, it is the centrality of women in Islam’s core texts that sets Islam apart from other monotheisms: “How many of the world’s major living religions incorporate women’s accounts into their central texts, or allow a woman’s testimony as to the correct reading of a single word of a sacred text to influence decisions?”

My temptation, when I came across it, was to snap her biography shut in disgust. Islam’s detractors have done that for centuries, dismissing the marriage between the fifty-year-old Muhammad and the little girl as pedophilia. But to shut the book, so to speak, would reduce Aisha to merely being a bride. To focus only on her age at marriage, rather than what came after it, I’d miss the best bits of the story, the ones that add tone and texture, not just to the marriage, but to Aisha herself. For the child bride grows into a heroine for grown-ups. After the Prophet’s death, when the jousting began over what Muhammad actually said and did, Aisha proved an agile debater against misogyny.

The Sheikh didn’t believe that male and female students should be segregated at his lectures, since they hadn’t been in the time of the Prophet Muhammad.

“When the revelation came to him, the Prophet became very, very happy,” he said. “And his face shone. And he said, “Oh, Aisha, your purity has been revealed to me by the heaven.” The girl’s mother immediately urged her to thank her husband. Aisha wouldn’t. “She said, ‘No,’” said Akram, admiringly. “She said, ‘I’m not going to thank him. I’m going to thank my Lord.’ She was so bright, no doubt, that she had learnt that Islam is about the connection to her Lord, and every word, every deed should be to please Him.” A husband, even if he was the Prophet, was not the dispenser of grace. Allah was.

And here, Akram laid out a powerful principle, one that had battered against man-made hierarchies from the start of Islamic history. No matter who you were, and what your situation, you were given an implicit dignity by faith in your God. Taqwa (God-consciousness) and imaan (belief) made you answerable not to the power structures around you, but to a higher power.

Aisha’s faith gave her the strength to withstand such pressures, to turn from earthly power structures in favor of something much, much larger.

‘You think your life is married life? Husbands can come and go, but your Lord is always there.’” Akram’s vision of taqwa also provided a key for combating oppression within marriage. To the husbands in the audience who might be tempted to mistreat their wives he’d state its corollary: “You don’t rule her! You didn’t create her! If your wife is happy, thank Allah and be happy. We did not create our wives, and we did not create our husbands. Allah did.” His reasoning was framed in the language of submitting to Allah alone: no human should have control over any other one. It sounded bracing, liberating, and as stripped of gooey romanticism as any second-wave feminist text.

“The wife’s job,” continued Akram, “is to educate the children. So the primary criterion to look for in a wife, is to look for someone educated.”

What’s more, he said, “We have never had any single report that she was unhappy.” Like the Prophet’s other wives, she was given a choice whether or not to leave his house, and she chose to stay. What’s more, we had her word on her happiness in the marriage, for it is her account of it that has been passed down from generation to generation. Unlike so many women, Aisha got to tell her side of the story.

One culture could never understand another “unless they appreciate the main foundation of the culture.” Non-Muslims, who may not know the Prophet’s honesty and purity, might never be able to understand some of his actions. “When you read the story in light of our time, it looks bad, but when you read it in light of the Prophet, then it’s understandable.”

If you grow up in a certain context, and your mind is so much thinking one way, you can’t think of things like this in any other way.”

For the Sheikh, marriage, even relatively young, was far preferable to the Western phenomenon of unmarried teenage motherhood. “Without marriage, people are having kids at fifteen, sixteen, and so the woman is left alone,” he argued. “That’s worse, surely!”

The pursuit of justice, the Sheikh told the two women, needed to be informed by women’s voices and experiences. Muslims shouldn’t merely look to classical texts to understand their faith. Today’s scholars needed to write new ones, taking into account women’s viewpoints on the true spirit of the Quran and the sunna. “Write a book,” he urged Arzoo. “Women were not so present when these legal opinions were being written. You must write a book.”

How ironic, I later mused, that so many outsiders see Islam as a matter of cast-iron rules, of binding fatwas and unforgiving bans. As the year went on, I was repeatedly surprised by the broadness of its intellectual framework. This intrinsic flexibility could be used for good and ill alike: Islamic laws were only as humane as the Muslims interpreting them.

“Laws don’t make people pious,” he observed. “They protect piety when it is already there.” Governments couldn’t legislate their citizens into submission: Iran and Saudi Arabia proved that. Just as trying to impose sharia law wouldn’t make people into good Muslims, imposing the hijab wouldn’t automatically confer modesty. Without fear of God and a true submission to Him, these outward displays of Islamic identities were just about showing off an identity, he explained, not about faith. “There could be people who follow sharia law, but they’re not believers,” he said. “Or there could be someone who doesn’t cover, but they are believers,” he said.

In the Islamic world over the last two centuries, the biggest boundaries crossed have been territorial, in the form of Western imperialism. But these incursions into Muslim lands frequently led to skirmishes over more intimate boundaries: those related to women, and how they covered, or didn’t cover, their bodies. From the French in nineteenth-century Algeria to the Americans in twenty-first-century Afghanistan, Western military invasions of Islamic countries have been accompanied by rhetoric about liberating Muslim women from their hijabs. To “modernize” or subdue a country meant to unveil its women. “The Arabs elude us,” noted General Bugeaud, the French administrator of Algeria in the 1840s, “because they conceal their women from our gaze.”

The extent to which a Muslim country’s women veiled—or didn’t veil—has long served as a sort of litmus test for its relationship to the West. For the Middle Eastern dictator, making your women take off their veils was a cheap and easy way to prove you were moving toward Western-style “progress.”

Making women take off their headcoverings signaled assertive Westernization, or secularization. Orders to veil sent a countermessage, telegraphing a commitment to traditionalism and independence from the West.

It’s an epic struggle that continues to this day, not just in the Muslim-majority countries but also in Europe. The judgments—for wearing a hijab, for not wearing a hijab—rain down on women as well as nation-states. Too often the meaning of the hijab is taken as clear and unequivocal, like an on-off switch, a neat binary code. A Muslim woman is “traditional” if she wears one, “modern” if she doesn’t. “Oppressed” if she wears one, “liberated” if not. Scarf on: “devout.” Scarfless: “moderate,” or, who knows? Perhaps even “secular.” Much like my efforts to locate the Sheikh on a spectrum modeled on the American scale from left to right, such conceits are doomed to fail.

When my friend Tara and I spent afternoons playing Iranian Ladies, dandling our baby dolls while wrapped in our chadors, there was a tacit agreement that the women in chadors held far more dramatic potential than our American mothers. With their jeans and uncovered hair, American women lacked the force field of femininity that the women in chadors possessed. In 1972, with our feminist mothers jettisoning their heels and lipsticks, it was chador-clad Iranians who embodied a five-year-old’s vision of what it meant to be a woman.

Once, back working at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, I’d accidentally walked in on my Pakistani colleague Iftikhar while he was praying. Mortified, I quickly turned and left, shutting the door behind me. Later, he brushed away my apologies. “That’s the difference between us,” he said, waving a hand breezily. “You Westerners make love in public and pray in private. We Muslims do exactly the reverse.”

“Uncovering makes more clear who are men and women,” he said. “And when they cover their differences, they are more like the same.” The big issue was whether they were at home or in public. “God has made men and women both as human beings, but with certain differences,” said the Sheikh. “Inside their houses, they can meet as men and women.” Out in the street, they should meet as humans. “Covering those differences,” he said, “helps people to be treated as human beings.”

“Let us start by talking about the chapter as a whole,” he said gently. “If you read the sura from the very beginning, you will find that it is actually defending women.” As Akram explained it, “An-Nisa” was a sura that protected women, not punished them. It laid out the approved treatment of weaker members of society, such as orphans, war widows, and women in general. Between its dictates, the sura reminds people to fear and to obey God. These warnings, embedded in a chapter concerned with the rights of the weak, are a rhetorical form of protection, explained Akram. “Clever people, or people with power, they always can interpret law in their own ways,” he said. “So God reminds people, ‘Fear Me.’ Now we know, in your house, if you do injustice to your wife, maybe she cannot take you to court … but there’s another court.” He pointed upward. “The Lord knows what’s happening.”

“Change can be hard, huh?” I said. “Even when you’re benefiting from it.” “Injustice has its own order,” the Sheikh agreed. “After one or two generations, it can seem like injustice is the normal way of doing things. When you try to establish justice, it can create change, and for a time, it seems there is disorder.”

The Cambridge itikaf didn’t entirely seal off ordinary life, but it did throw the everyday into relief. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims on the way to Canterbury, some itikaf participants seemed to see it as nearly as much of a social event as a spiritual one. (Later, I’d hear that some attendees had criticized what they felt was a too-casual air, suggesting that less talking and fewer cookies might have engendered a more spiritual atmosphere.) But whether on hajj or in itikaf, this porous quality between a spiritual experience and ordinary life is a feature—and a strength—of Muslim life. Islam affords an infinite space for spirituality, but it also provides guidelines for society itself. It concerns itself not just with solitary souls, but with how these souls interact with the world.

When we’d meet for our private lessons, the Sheikh often spoke about Ibrahim, whose stoic devotion to God greatly impressed the Sheikh. “He made submission in the full details,” he said, sounding rather awed. “What he did was not only worshipping God. It was turning away from everything, sacrificing everything for the sake of God.”

“It reminds me of what a famous American football coach, in the 1960s, had remarked about winners,” he added. “He said, ‘The difference between a successful person and others was not a lack of strength, or a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.’” “Sheikh, who was this coach?” I said, sideswiped by the sudden appearance of an NFL personality in our discussion. “I forget the name … he was famous. He died in 1970…” “Vince Lombardi?” I said, producing the only name of a football coach I could remember from childhood. “Vince Lombardi,” nodded the Sheikh. “Yes.”

Given my parents’ casual attitude toward religion, it should come as no surprise that my first-ever Bible sermon was delivered by an Indian Muslim. Like many living far from the country of their birth, I’ve often engaged most fully with American culture by stepping back and looking at it from a distance. “What should they know of England, who only England know?” asked Rudyard Kipling. Not much. For me, distance has always spurred engagement, if not enchantment. I was most attentive to Western culture when I was far away from it. I’d never really listened to Bach until I discovered an LP of his flute concertos in Kabul, carefully shipped there by my parents via diplomatic pouch. The plights of Pip, Estella, and Miss Havisham felt far more urgent when read on a Turkish bus ride than they ever would have back in Missouri. The same principle held when it came to my interest in Islam: I’d never paid it much attention while we lived in Muslim countries. My curiosity grew only when I went to a college founded by Congregationalists in New England.

“When Jesus came, the Jews really wanted to be treated as believers without being believers,” he said. “We Muslims, at this moment, want to be treated as believers without being believers.” Modern Muslims often simply cling to the external signs of their faith: “People are busy worrying about their beards, or their headscarves,” he observed. “So the faith becomes like their identity. It happens like this in every culture, every faith. The outer aspects become more important, while the soul inside is forgotten.” He paused, shook his head, and gazed mournfully out at the crowd. “At the end of the day, people are carrying around a dead body, with no soul.” “Why do we Muslims have so much suffering, all over the world?” he demanded. “We are carrying the body of Islam! We don’t have submission. We have got the law, but without the hikma—the wisdom—behind it. Religion hasn’t come to give people an identity! Its purpose is not so you can say, ‘We belong to this group.’ But at this moment ninety-nine percent of Muslims treat religion as identity! But God does not like identity. He does not want people to be proud of belonging. He wants faith, and he wants action.”

submits,” or “one who surrenders.” But there’s a huge difference between Muslims with a capital M (a faith group) and lowercased-m muslims (monotheists who have submitted to God). Much depends on whether one reads it as a proper noun describing who someone is, or as a verb describing what they do. When I look up English translations of bin Laden’s 1996 declaration of jihad against American troops, the online translators render the opening sura he quotes thus: “O you who believe! Be careful of your duty to Allah with the proper care which is due to Him, and do not die unless you are Muslim.” But when I opened my copy of Thomas Cleary’s translation of the Quran, I found that the final phrase was translated, rather less stringently, as “do not die without your having surrendered to God.” When I point out that so much of the Quranic message seemed to be about lowercased-m muslims, or rather, anyone who has submitted to God, the Sheikh was delighted: “Yes! Exactly! So many times in the Quran, it is not describing a group called ‘the Muslims.’ The word is with a small m, describing those who submit to the Lord!”

But it’s capitalized-M Muslims who inevitably make the news, or feature in government debates and sternly worded op-eds. Capitalized-M Muslims feed the whole “clash of civilizations” myth, with its claim that Islam and the West are two airtight systems. For those who hold with such a notion, the two are mutually exclusive; for extremists on both sides, “the Islamic world” and “the West” are straining toward each other’s destruction.

When the Sheikh’s students voiced fears about Islamophobic media coverage, or Western laws that they felt discriminated against Muslims, the Sheikh would warn them to be careful not to confuse group politics with piety. “Islam is not a property,” Akram once observed during a seminar. “It’s not your identity. Don’t think that if someone laughs at you, you have to explain yourself. We are more interested in defending our belonging, our identity, than in the Prophet. Don’t think about identity! Think about good character!”

British-Indian novelist published a story slurring the Prophet Muhammad? Ignore it. Don’t issue fatwas against him, or burn books in town centers, or stage protest rallies. Turn away from this world and toward God. Pray. Do dawa—call people to Islam. “If people write books against your Prophet, there are many ways to solve the problem! The best way is to pray for these people. Write some books yourself.” Some cartoonist in Denmark sketched some ugly little pictures insulting the Prophet? Let it go; go toward God instead. “Someone makes a cartoon, and we protest. We make protest, and we think we’re doing what we’re supposed to do!” They’re not. “Where is it in the book of Allah that we ‘protest’? Is this business of ‘protest’ anywhere in the Quran or the Prophet’s sunna?” Akram urged his students to look at the Prophet and his Companions. Faced with a silly sketch, or a nasty novel, would they have demonstrated? “Let’s think, really,” he urged. “No matter how much the Prophet had been abused by people who opposed him, did he protest? Did he burn their houses? Did he harm them? No! He went to do dawa. When he wanted to persuade the people in Mecca to become Muslim, he would go to someone’s house seventy times! He would have patience!”