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

by Carla Power

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.