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

by Carla Power

When my mother died, I remember thinking how sensible it was, the Muslim practice of saying “Inshallah,” or “God willing,” after every plan, every promise, no matter how minor, since only God can be sure whether next Wednesday’s lunch date will indeed be kept. It was a comfort, in a season of grief, to hang out with a community that honored this world’s uncertainties.

Migrants, particularly Muslim ones, are often cast as people whose lives are broken in two by moving to the West. In the United States and Europe, the post-9/11 focus on security and integration among Muslim minorities has meant that hyphens, such as those in “Muslim-American” or “British-Pakistani,” are read as breaks, not bridges. But migration can double a self as well as halve it. Salman Rushdie has called migrants “translated men.” Too often, it’s assumed “that something always gets lost in translation,” Rushdie wrote. “I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”

When the Sheikh and I did disagree, our collisions only served to remind me how relatively recently the prevailing Western views had formed. Our lessons coincided with the evolution of what tolerance and human rights meant in Europe and North America. Month by month, it seemed, more states and nations expanded their definitions of the meaning of justice. Of what constituted a family. A couple. Equality. When I was born, gays in England were criminals. Midway through writing this book, they won the right to be brides and grooms. Lessons with the Sheikh underscored not merely the dynamism of contemporary Muslim societies, but also the dynamism of the West.

Akram reminded me that Western absolutes were made, not born. What I take as Truth is built on a history of revolutions—political, industrial, and personal. A girl’s right to school and a childhood weren’t fixtures of the landscape, like a boulder or an ocean. They had to be fought for, and then created. It was bracing, this reminder of my own culture as a living tradition, built by framing and reframing the norms of what justice means.

Only nearing the end of our lessons did I recognize the irony of the year’s project. Studying the Sheikh’s faith had allowed me to practice mine. Our lessons were rites paying tribute to my belief that to be fully human is to try to understand others. Had he been entirely convinced of my worldview, or me of his, we would have risked destroying the fragile ecosystem of our friendship, made richer and stranger by our differences. For if understanding difference is among my own key values, it is also a Quranic one. Only through diversity, says the Quran, can you truly learn the shape and heft of your own humanity: O humankind, We created you from a male and a female, and We made you races and tribes for you to get to know each other. (49:13) And also to know ourselves. Without a year trying to see the world from Akram’s vantage, I wouldn’t be able to make out the contours of my own.