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

by Carla Power

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.”