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

by Carla Power

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...