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

by Carla Power

Like any rich and complex text, the Quran is invoked more often than read, and read more often than its meanings are agreed upon.

Say, even if the ocean were ink For (writing) the words of my Lord, The ocean would be exhausted Before the words of my Lord were exhausted, Even if We were to add another ocean to it. (Chapter 18: Verse 109)

The Marxist and the Wall Street banker, the despot and the democrat, the terrorist and the pluralist—each can point to a passage in support of his cause.

Between teaching and work at the Centre, he produced research that chipped away at the belief that Islam had never allowed women freedoms. Over those years, he uncovered a long-forgotten history of female Islamic scholarship, blotted out by centuries of cultural conservatism: a tradition of women religious authorities stretching back to the days of the Prophet. When he started, he figured that biographies of women religious scholars would make a slim volume, representing thirty or forty women. Ten years on, the work stands at forty volumes. He’d discovered nearly nine thousand women, including ones who lectured, dispensed fatwas, and traveled on horse- and camelback in pursuit of religious education. The Sheikh’s work on women scholars challenges bigots of all types. The Taliban gunman who shoots a girl for going to school. The mullah who bars women from his mosque. The firebrand who claims that feminism is a Western ideology undermining the Islamic way of life. The Westerner who claims that Islam oppresses women, and always has.

To be fair, Islam is so all-encompassing that one can easily swerve from its spiritual aspects. Its foundations, the famous five pillars, are mostly centered on actions rather than beliefs: reciting the shahada, the statement that “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet”; performing the five daily prayers; giving to charity; fasting during the holy month of Ramadan; and going on hajj. With guidelines on everything from dressing to eating to trading, Islam is woven through the world itself rather than confined to church on Sundays.

Sunni Islam famously lacks a clergy and a central organizing structure. With no archbishop’s office or local diocese to steer one toward a particular scholar or imam, anyone seeking Islamic knowledge can study with anybody who will teach them.

Far more effort and class time is given to the texts of jurisprudence or hadith.” The branches of Islamic knowledge that came after the Prophet’s death, like law and philosophy, had only made the Muslim world’s injustices and divisions grow, he continued. They’d moved mankind further from the source. The message of the Quran and the sunna, the example of the Prophet Muhammad, had been buried by a mountain of academic debate. In the centuries after Muhammad, scholars erected an elaborate system of fiqh, or jurisprudence, a man-made legal scaffolding based on interpretations of the Quran and hadith.

The medieval religious scholars who developed fiqh were frequently far more conservative than the Quran, and often much more punitive than the Prophet Muhammad. “Read the books of Islamic law, and you’ll see they are much harsher on women,” said Akram. “You know when they get really against women? When all the scholars start studying philosophy.” The misogyny running through fiqh, said the Sheikh, was a matter not merely of scholars’ medieval mores, but of the influence of the Greek philosophers on them.

“You see, Carla, what’s happened, really, is that we in the Muslim world have destroyed the whole balance. We’ve become obsessed with these tiny details, these laws. What does the Quran keep repeating? Purity of the heart. That’s what’s important! Why has cutting off a thief’s hand—something it mentions once!—become of such importance to some people?”

“When it says ‘Thee alone we worship,’ it means people aren’t allowed to worship any angel, any man of money, or any man of power,” explained Akram. “A Muslim submits only to God.” There. Right there lay the justification for everything from the Arab Spring revolts to the Islamic women’s movement. With breathtaking linguistic economy, sitting just inside the first verse of the Quran, lay the words that punctured tyranny. They were gentle weaponry against husbands who ruled over their wives, or presidents who tortured their people. In a God-centered universe, no person had the right to rule over another person, since all were equal before their creator. It gave people an inherent dignity vis-à-vis their fellow humans.

Akram pointed out that the line “to You we turn for help” is an indication of Islam’s central tenet of submission. “It shows mankind asking how to worship,” he noted. “It is saying, ‘We are helpless people. We need more of your favor. We need to know how to worship You.’” Here again was the surrender that Islam—derived from the same Arabic root word as “peace,” but literally meaning “submission”—demands of a Muslim. “When you see the word ‘worship,’ or ibada in Arabic, this is the sort of extreme humiliation that is only allowed in the case of God,” observed Akram. “That’s why we have to bow in prayer. Before him, we require an extreme humbleness.” While Christianity and Judaism drew their names from people, the word “Islam” refers to a relationship rather than a single figure—that between every believer and God.

Before the Russians finally invaded in 1979, it played out in tit-for-tat development projects. The Soviets built Kabul’s airport; the Americans provided its communications and electronics. The Soviets hollowed out the Hindu Kush to make the Salang Pass; the Americans dug a dam in Helmand.

“Islam is not an idea,” he told me one day via Skype. “It is a history.”

Because at the end of the day, every religion and creed calls for justice. Everybody knows you need to be nice to people. To give people justice and their rights, to do charity. You don’t need Islam for this! Doesn’t the United Nations have the same concerns? These ideas you can make from your own home!” Islam anchored these universal human values in the history of the Prophet Muhammad. “This morality is not abstract,” said Akram. “They are connected to the details of a history, the life of the Prophet Muhammad.” Loyalty to that history—to the Prophet’s sunna, or words and deeds—is what makes Muslims different from all the other humans striving to be good. Preserving the Prophet’s sunna in everything one did, from brushing one’s teeth to building a system of government, thus became a sacred act. “Islam has been revealed to the Prophet Muhammad, and he taught it to his Companions, and now it is a duty for us to transmit it to the next generation exactly as he transmitted it to them.”

Much like the first followers of Jesus, Muhammad’s earliest Companions were often drawn from the poor or disenfranchised sectors of society. To a tribal culture, Islam brought a radical new concept: a community based not on family or clan, but on faith. No longer could wealth or bloodlines protect you. Just piety. The new faith introduced other forms of equality as well. Islam didn’t tolerate the Arab custom of burying girls at birth. Women were no longer to be regarded as chattel, but as human beings with rights to inherit property and to dispose of their own wealth as they saw fit. The rich should give to the poor. All races were equal under God.

In AD 622, on news that the Quraysh were plotting his murder, Muhammad himself joined the other Muslims in what was to become Medina, or “the City,” short for “City of the Prophet.” The move, known as the Hijra, or “migration,” was so pivotal as to mark the start of the Muslim calendar. In Medina, Muhammad and his Companions were to build Islam’s first mosque: a courtyard with a roof of palm fronds supported by trunks, surrounded by huts for Muhammad’s family. It was there that his role as a spiritual leader expanded to include a political role as well.

I suddenly glimpsed the narrowness of my own vision of broad-mindedness. In my creed, sex, drugs, rock and roll, and any number of other explorations were fine, so long as nobody got hurt. Such tolerance derived from the assumption that this life is all we have, and that every individual has freedom. Akram’s tolerance came from a belief in just the opposite: in a God-centered universe, nobody has freedom, and nobody has the right to judge others. That is God’s job. The Quran is not merely a guide, but a means to broaden the mind. “Don’t look at this tiny world,” he suggested. “Things are much bigger than you can imagine. There’s a past beyond your past, and a future beyond your future.”

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.

“To someone who has grown up in the village, they think it is totally Islamic. They can’t separate what is tradition from what is Islamic. They only thing people in Jamdahan know about the niqab is that the Hindus don’t wear them, and Muslims do.” Like many village customs, “they are traditions not done from religious knowledge, but to build their identity as a group.”

I wouldn’t find hard-line anti-Western rhetoric in the village, the Sheikh assured me. “They are very simple people,” he said. “They praise British rule more than Indian rule, because all they care about is who makes their lives better.” Urban elites might have the luxury of thinking big thoughts about colonialism and the struggle for independence, but for Jamdahanis, what mattered was the fact that the railway track that took them to Jaunpur was British, just like the BBC they listened to on their battery-operated radios.

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.

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.

After the seventeenth century, with the rise of European colonial rule in many Muslim countries, women’s scholarship declined. The Sheikh explained its dilapidation, in part, by the more general decline in Muslim intellectual confidence. The madrasa system languished, so patriarchal customs filled the vacuum. Flabby leadership from the ulama, many of whom have turned to politics rather than scholarship, left Muslims ignorant of their own history. “Our traditions have grown weak,” the Sheikh once told me, “and when people are weak, they grow cautious. When they’re cautious, they don’t give women their freedoms.”

Done right, sex is an Islamic blessing. “A man’s sexual play with his partner, when accompanied by sincere intent, causes him to be rewarded by Allah,” wrote the sixteenth-century hadith scholar Ali Muttaqi. “As the Prophet is reported to have said, ‘Allah is pleased with a man’s playing with his wife, and records a reward for him and makes a worthy provision in the world for him because of it.’” Christianity links sex to sin, but the Cambridge theologian Tim Winter notes that Islam casts it as “a glimpse of transcendence.” Islam doesn’t endorse celibacy and has no mainstream traditions of monks or nuns. “In the Christian context,” Winter once explained to a British newspaper, “sexuality is traditionally seen as a consequence of the Fall, but for Muslims, it is an anticipation of paradise.”

In the context of seventh-century Arabia, the notion that women had rights of any kind, and were God’s creations, on a par with men, was revolutionary. In pre-Islamic Arabia, girls were considered a liability. They were mouths to feed, and bodies requiring expensive dowries when they married, so they were sometimes murdered at birth, buried in the desert dunes—a practice the Quran explicitly condemns. Those females who made it past childhood were nearly always prohibited from inheriting or owning property. Indeed, a woman was effectively part of a man’s goods and chattels: if her husband died, she passed to his male heir, along with the rest of the property. With the arrival of Islam, women gained the right to inherit: the Quran states they are entitled to half as much as their male relatives. The formula may not meet contemporary Western notions of equality, but in seventh-century Arabian society, it was a model of fairness. In the traditional Islamic setup, it is the man, not the woman, who supports a family financially. A woman’s inheritance is her own, to be spent as she wants; a man’s duty is to use his inheritance to support his family.

In her famous essay “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” Rachel Adler writes of how orthodox Judaism’s exemptions for women, children, and slaves made all three groups “peripheral Jews.” Allowing them to skip such rites as hearing the shofar on Rosh Hashanah or praying at the three daily services meant that they were “‘excused’ from most of the positive symbols which, for the male Jew, hallow time, hallow his physical being, and inform both his myth and his philosophy.” In Islam, the dispensation that allowed women to pray at home worked, in practice, to deny many of the pleasures and support of communal mosque prayers. In many Muslim cultures, it had also morphed considerably, from being a rule allowing women to stay at home into a custom of confining them to it.

In Arabic, umra, or “the visit,” is the smaller of the two Meccan pilgrimages. Unlike the hajj, which occurs on five days in the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar, umra can be undertaken any time of the year. One of the five pillars of Islam, the hajj is required for all Muslims at least once in their lives, if they are physically and financially able to perform it. Hajj requires stamina of the body as well as of the soul: pilgrims walk seven times around the sacred black stone, the Kaaba, run between two sacred hills, and pray on Mount Arafat. As part of the symbolic renunciation of evil, “Stoning the Devil,” pilgrims hurl pebbles at three pillars, on the spots where Satan was said to have tempted Ibrahim, telling him to ignore God’s command that he sacrifice his son. Hajjis perform these rituals in a state of purity, avoiding sex, quarrels, or unpleasantness, since both hajj and umra are meant to purify the soul and to bring pilgrims close to their God.

Worshipping anything other than God—shirk—is Islam’s gravest sin, so mainstream Sunni Islam frowns on visiting graves as an act of religious devotion. For a scripturalist Muslim like the Sheikh, it was not permissible to travel simply to visit a grave, even the Prophet’s. Making pilgrimages to graves and shrines was a superstition of unlettered village Muslims or Sufi mystics. The Prophet’s grave was an exception: one could visit it, say “salaam” to it, but only if one happened to be in Medina anyway.

As a whole, the Quran’s message was much the same as the one that Abraham had brought: there is just one God. Within the Muslim faith, Muhammad is seen as continuing the biblical tradition, as the last in a line of monotheistic prophets stretching back to Adam. “God wanted to be fair with everybody,” explained the Sheikh. “He’s sent different messengers, but the real differences are just about language, or culture, or history. The main message is the same: to believe in God.”

The Quran took care to distinguish between the pre-Islamic Arabs who were pagan polytheists, worshipping idols at the Kaaba, and the Ahl-e-Kitab, or People of the Book, possessors of the Torah and the Bible. “When it comes to Jews and Christians, we respect them, because of their scriptures,” Akram once assured me. “They don’t belong to the same community, but that’s fine.”

To reinvigorate their faith, Akram believed that Muslims must begin paying attention not just to Muhammad, but to the prophets that preceded him. Too often, Muslims skimmed over the prophetic stories in the Quran. “A big mistake,” he said, peering out through his spectacles at the crowd. The five major prophets—Nuh (Noah), Ibrahim (Abraham), Musa (Moses), Isa (Jesus), and Muhammad “are the examples for the believers, at ever...

All told, there are twenty-five major prophets in the Quran. God has sent thousands of messengers to mankind, said the Sheikh: some traditional Islamic sources say there are as many as 124,000 of them. When it comes to honoring fellow prophets, the Quran is expansive: Say, “We believe in God, and what was revealed to us and what was revealed to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and the Tribes, and what was given to Moses and Jesus, and what was gi...

Both Muslims and Jews claimed Ibrahim as their ancestor: one of his sons, Ismail (Ishmael), was said to be the founding ancestor of Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh; and the other son, Ishaq (Isaac), was the ancestor of the Israelites. Ibrahim, says the Quran, was a hanif, a believer who did not identify himself as a member of a religious community, only as a fervent monotheist: “Abraham was not Jewish or Christian, but he was a committed devotee, and not a polytheistic one.” The Quran says that Ibrahim and his son Ismail built the Kaaba in Mecca.

For Akram, Jesus was a “man without a father,” whose extraordinary life served to remind lapsed believers of God’s power: “God made every single thing in Jesus’ life against the norm. His entrance in this world—against the norm.” His exit, too. He did not die upon the Cross, as the Bible says, but was raised to heaven alive. As Akram explained it, Christ’s would-be killers “were confused.” The Quran’s language is more formal: “They did not crucify him, although it was made to seem thus to them.”

Jesus appears not just in the Quran, but in the sira, the Prophet’s biography. According to Muhammad’s early biographers, the Angel Gabriel whisked Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem on Buraq, a winged creature with the body somewhere between a horse and a mule, “whose every stride carried it as far as its eye could reach.” In Jerusalem, Muhammad met and prayed with Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets. Later that night, during his ascension to heaven, Muhammad stopped off to visit them again, each in a different level of the seven heavens. On his return to Arabia, he would describe them vividly to his companions. Of Ibrahim, Muhammad said, “I have never seen a man more like myself.”

“Religion comes with a body and a soul,” the Sheikh explained. “But after a few generations, etiquette and manners become more important in a religion, which means the spirit of the religion disappears.” Such was the situation among the Jewish people, he said, when Jesus began preaching: they had forgotten Abraham’s covenant with God. Over time, their religion had settled into a matter of habit. They began to treat Judaism as a matter of belonging to a people rather than believing in a God, he argued. Such was the case for many Muslims today: “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.”

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.”

The Quran revered the prophets of the Jews and Christians—but the Jews and Christians, in turn, needed to believe in the message of the Prophet Muhammad: “You cannot deny any of the Prophets. They believe in their own Prophets, just as we do, but they cannot deny Muhammad and his Message. Otherwise, it is just holding on to the religion of their ancestors.” Clinging blindly to the faith of your forefathers, the Quran asserts, is arrogant. Noah’s 950 years of warning didn’t persuade pagans to forsake their idols, and so they were drowned. Moses warned the Pharaoh and his cronies, but they didn’t listen: on the Day of Resurrection, they will head to hell. To hold on to your ancestral faith without acknowledging the new signs that God sent you was to turn away from Him, said the Sheikh. Jews and Christians who wanted salvation must acknowledge Muhammad as a prophet.

Islam with a capital I refers to the religion itself, while islam with a lowercased i just denotes “submission” or “surrendering” to God. In this lies the difference between a specific religious group and something rather more elastic. The space between them suggests the creative tension between the Quran as a scripture reaffirming earlier Abrahamic faiths, and one setting up a community distinct from them. The Sheikh, and other scholars, read most of the allusions to “islam” in the Quran as lowercased islam. “In the Quranic worldview, ‘Islam’ is not so much the name of a new religious tradition as it is the quality of submitting oneself to God wholeheartedly,” writes the professor of Islamic studies Omid Safi in Memories of Muhammad. “For the most part in the Quran the word ‘Islam’ is a verb, not a noun.” Similarly, the word “Muslim” means “one who 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 C...

In the early Medina years, notes Reza Aslan in No god but God, Muhammad stressed that his message was for all the People of the Book, and so he took care to promote acts that would build allegiances between the Muslim and Jewish communities. In the first Muslim state in Medina, the Prophet Muhammad guaranteed nonaggression between the Muslims and the rest of the population, including the Jewish, Christian, and pagan clans. “He who wrongs a Jew or a Christian,” said Muhammad, “will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgment.” The Muslim fast was to be observed on the same day as Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement. Like the Jews, Muslims were commanded to pray facing Jerusalem. Muhammad picked Friday as the day of communal prayer so as to be in concert (and not conflict) with the Jewish Sabbath. As the Muslim roots in Medina grew, so did the distinctions between its Jews and Muslims. Some of the town’s Jewish population began showing up in the mosque to jeer at the Muslim community, and to scoff at the differences between the Quran’s version of certain stories and the Torah’s. After a year and a half in Medina, the Prophet received a revelation that ordained that Muslims should switch their qibla, or direction of prayer, from Jerusalem to Mecca. This shift of orientation to the Kaaba was a sign, notes the author Karen Armstrong, “of a proud new Muslim identity.”

Like Mona, I’d always been taught that justice was the cornerstone virtue of Islam, occupying much the same position that love does in Christianity.

Should Islam be used as a political tool, or simply as moral guidance? Reformist Muslims of all orientations, from jihadis to feminists, have argued that the faith—or at least its symbols—should be employed for political change. Traditionalist Sunni ulama like Akram view their role as moral stewards, offering gentle guidance to rulers but not ruling themselves.

The Sheikh opposed any extremes, and indeed questioned any system, Western or Islamic, that claimed to be comprehensive. Islamist thinkers like Sayyid Qutb and Maulana Maududi, who wanted Islam to provide the answer for virtually everything in a modern society, were misguided. The great irony, in the Sheikh’s view, was that these great defenders of Islam were actually more Western than traditional Muslims. Qutb, with his talk of “systems” and his call for a “vanguard” to create an Islamic state, could sound awfully close to a twentieth-century Western revolutionary at times. Malise Ruthven, a scholar of Islamic movements, notes that Qutb’s concept of the vanguard is a European import, with a lineage starting with the Jacobins, and developing through the Bolsheviks and more recent Marxist guerrillas like the Baader-Meinhof gang. Akram put it more simply: the young people who looked to Islam as an answer for everything from penal codes to banking practices simply wanted a Western state with an Islamic flavor. The “Islamicization” of everything sprang from a deep envy of the West’s power and geopolitical supremacy. “All they want,” he said, “is what the West has.”

He leaned forward as though about to share a confidence. “You know what these Islamic reform movements are really for?” “What?” I smiled. “They’re for Western-educated Muslims, to convince them that Islam can also deliver what the West has. It’s to tell them, ‘Oh, they laugh at you? Well, you have the power to laugh at them.’ But Islam is not like that. “Islamic movements, they think they can get a reward in this world,” he sighed. “If the state and power are so important, why are the Prophets so important? Ninety-nine percent of them didn’t have any power. Ibrahim didn’t have a state. Jesus Christ didn’t!” As for political Muslims, fond of talking about Medina as the first Islamic State, and the Constitution of Medina as the ideal basis for contemporary politics? Misguided, to his mind. The Prophet hadn’t wanted to leave Mecca in the first place: he was forced to leave, since he was unable to practice his faith. And when he got to what would become Medina, it was in search of freedom of religious worship, not power. Power was thrust upon him. “He did not especially want to run a state,” explained the Sheikh. “But when he got to Medina, he had to organize it properly.” One website proclaims the Constitution of Medina “the first written constitution in human history” and claims it laid the “practical foundation of democracy.” Such parallels suggest a profound insecurity, he suggested. “Many Muslims became influenced by Western ideas of the state, and they want to find it in...

Every war has countless beginnings, hundreds of moments pushing toward that first shot fired, the first pulse stilled. For many Americans, the modern conflicts between Islam and the West began on a September day when horrors fell from a blue sky over Manhattan. An Al-Qaeda combatant might date their start back to 1991, when American troops flooded onto Saudi Arabian soil after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. An Iranian government cleric may point to 1953, when a CIA-backed coup toppled the democratically elected prime minister and installed the Shah. A Pakistani jihadi might set the conflict’s origins back to 1947, to a summer when a London barrister created India and Pakistan, carving up the subcontinent like a Sunday roast. Others would cite 1933, when the Saudis granted a concession to a California oil company. As always with history, there are scores of beginnings to choose from, leading back as far as the day in 1600 when Queen Elizabeth gave the East India Company their royal charter.

Everyone knew that the men Washington trained and armed during the 1980s to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan had helped produce future jihadis. It was a commonplace, even before September 11, that global jihadis were “blowback” from the Afghan war, the unintended consequences of a covert military operation. The Major was blowback’s human face. That this face spoke perfect English, polished by training with Americans, made it all the more chilling.

An influential study examined the backgrounds of four hundred violent extremists and found that only 13 percent were from madrasas or Islamic boarding schools. The Sheikh hadn’t heard of the study, but its profile of extremists with day jobs as engineers and doctors didn’t surprise him. It was “Western-educated types,” not madrasa graduates, he said, who harbored the biggest grudges against the West. “They want what the West has,” he said. “They want power.”

If the Sheikh thought little of jihadis’ Islamic credentials, jihad’s ideologues were similarly dismissive of madrasa scholars. It was the ulama, they charged, who wanted what the West had: a religion as privatized and part-time as Christianity had been ever since the Enlightenment. Traditional Islamic scholars were simply “defeated people,” charged Sayyid Qutb. “They have adopted the Western concept of ‘religion,’ which is merely a name for ‘belief in the heart,’ having no relation to the practical affairs of life.”

In the West, the word “jihad”—literally, striving or struggle—has become synonymous with wars like the Major’s. But jihad al-nafs, the struggle of the individual against his lesser self, means a person’s effort to quell negative impulses and to lead a pious life. The twin meanings of “jihad” are threaded through a story the Sheikh liked to tell. A group of mujahidin on their way to battle stayed overnight at the lodge of some Islamic mystics, or Sufis. In the morning, one young Sufi disciple, awed by the warriors’ steeds and swords, went to his sheikh and told him that he was joining the mujahidin. Armed jihad was the easy route, his sheikh warned. Far harder was the struggle to maintain a lifetime of submission to Allah. “It is easy for me to have my neck cut once,” the elder explained. “It is hard for me to bow my head all the time, day after day.”

“So what would you need in place to make a jihad legitimate?” I asked the Sheikh. “First, believers must make dawa—call people to Islam. Once they have done this properly, and have found a place where they can live as a community…” “Then they are allowed…?” “When they have a community—not a state, but a Muslim society,” he said, reluctant, as always, to graft modern political terms onto Islamic concepts. “If you have one, and there are people who are preventing you from preaching, or from worshipping—then Islam allows you to fight back.” Then and only then: one could wage jihad only if one was being prevented from worshipping freely. While Qutb and his ideological grandchildren had cast jihad as an offensive war, the Sheikh saw jihad solely as a matter of self-defense. “And then,” he continued, “there are two more conditions.” First, the Muslims need a safe place from which to launch the jihad. Second, Muslims needed enough troops and weapons so that victory looked likely. Today, Muslims had neither: “Muslims have no safe places in our time, so when they try to wage jihad, many of them are killed.” Contemporary Muslims lacked the causes or the conditions for armed struggle. “If you do things in the wrong order, it can never work,” said the Sheikh.