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

by Carla Power

“Most Muslims haven’t read it either,” Akram said brightly, buttering his scone. “And even if they have, they don’t understand it. The Quran is alien to them. Usually, they’ll just go to the books of law. Or if they’re interested in piety or purifying the heart, they’ll read Ghazali”—a philosopher—“or Sufis like Rumi.”

“In fact, the Quran is often the weakest part of the madrasa curriculum.”

“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. Aristotle, a man who held that the subjugation of women was both “natural” and a “social necessity,” influenced key Muslim thinkers who shaped medieval fiqh, argued Akram. Before Aristotle became a core text, and before the medieval scholars enshrined their views on gender roles in Islamic law, men and women were accorded far more equal freedoms in Islam, he explained.

My time studying with the Sheikh felt a lot like desert travel. The sun can dazzle, and the air’s clearness can compress the appearance of distances. A far-off dune can look near; the horizon can loom, then recede in a blink. A strong wind can cover paths and footprints with sand. Such was the experience of studying with the Sheikh. The Quranic landscape was neither dry nor parched, but to a Western secularist like myself, unschooled in scriptures of any faith, it often lacked landmarks. I found myself setting mental boundaries, then having to reset them, again and again. We made an odd little caravan, the Sheikh and I, a pious believer and a skeptical secularist.

It could be quite dizzying. But disorientation is a good teacher.

The Sheikh was never truly disoriented. He had his qibla—his direction—and that direction was God.

Umm al-Darda, a prominent seventh-century jurist from Damascus. Akram found that as a young woman, she used to sit with male scholars in the mosques, discussing theology. “I’ve tried to worship Allah in every way,” she wrote, “but I’ve never found a better one than sitting around debating other scholars.” That quote alone made me want to adopt Umm al-Darda as an unofficial patron saint for this project: I loved the image of her sitting in the mosque with men, secure in her knowledge that debate was a holy thing.

Why on earth, I remember wondering, would Akram remain in Oxford, suffering loneliness and the British rain and working on a job that wasted his scholarly gifts? It was only years later, when I heard the Sheikh teach the sura on Yusuf, the Quran’s chapter on the Prophet Joseph, that I began to understand. What I’d first dismissed as passivity was revealed as something far more purposeful: a muscular submission.

The Quran tells the story vividly, particularly the scene in which the master’s wife attempts to seduce Yusuf. So vividly, in fact, that one Muslim scholar forbade women to learn it. Luckily, Akram disagreed. The fatwa against reading sura 12 was unsound, he said, likening it to other fatwas designed to limit women’s rights, like the one banning women from learning to write on the grounds that they could write love letters, or from living on high floors lest they be seen from outside. “Nothing in the Quran is for the men or for the women,” he emphasized, peering out at the crowd. “It’s for men and women both.”

the whiteboard next to him, the Sheikh drew a line. Next to it, he sketched a circle. The line represented your space, the environment in which you find yourself. The space could be anywhere—a well, a prison cell, a state ruled by a despot, or a foreign country. Next, he pointed to the circle. That symbolized the cycle of a Muslim’s life, the steady beat of night and day, ticking away, for as long as God chose to keep you on this earth. The space you found yourself in was not in your control, said Akram. The cycle was. Your circumstances were given to you by Allah; using the cycle of your days to practice taqwa, or love and awe of God, was your job. Tend to this cycle of faith, said Akram, rather than worrying about your circumstances: “Any condition, even the worst condition of life, will result in something better if you keep the cycle going on,” he intoned. “Whatever circumstance. You are in prison, you are a slave, you are a master, you have parents, you don’t have parents, you are married, you are not, you speak Urdu, you speak English. Whatever space you have been given by Allah, thank Him!” Consider Yusuf, he went on. “He was in the well. Did he complain? He was sold into slavery. And did he complain? He was sold as a slave in Egypt, then put in prison, what could be worse than that?” Yusuf taught us stoicism whatever happened.

Besides, he pressed, did living in the West prevent you in any way from being a good Muslim? “Tell me,” he persisted. “Is any government stopping you from being pious? When you are in the mosque, is anyone stopping you from being pious? Do you really need an Islamic government to make your house pious?”

Prayers were a home, even far away from one’s homeland. A five-times-daily return to origins, no matter where in the world one found oneself.

I left lunch with a neatly framed image of Akram and Farhana’s marriage. I’d read the news stories about first-generation South Asian women in Britain, ground down by isolation and tradition. I was certain I knew what was at work here: a busy husband with a spouse cut off from her home and culture. Farhana, I decided, was suffering from the misery of exile. Weighed down by domestic drudgery. Imprisoned by tradition. Such was my attempt to stuff her into a grand cultural narrative. Not long after, I realized that my vision of her as Virginia Woolf’s Angel of the House was a flight of fantasy.

There were no birthday parties for the Akram girls. To throw a party for something that Allah did—making a year pass—was to take credit for the divine order. Real achievements were celebrated, so the girls got parties in the backyard when they finished reading the Quran.

Like her father, Sumaiya believed that everyone has the right to make individual choices. But like him, she was conscious that people needed limits, and she was skeptical about the culture of individualism that dominates Western life. It starts so early, she marveled: “Even in nursery, in Show and Tell, there’s a sense of ‘Look what I’ve got.’ There’s all this emphasis on the fact that it’s your thing and you’re showing it off.”

“You don’t have this attitude that ‘I do what I want, because it’s my life,’ because the first thing you’re taught is that it’s not your life,” she said. “We believe you’ve been given this body to look after.”

The Quran is known as “A Book of Signs.” Aya means “verse” in Arabic, but it also means “sign,” and just as every verse of the Quran is a sign, so, too, is nature. The Milky Way, a birch tree, a breeze, all are made to guide humans toward belief. To read these signs was not just to believe, but to appreciate, just as “Al-Rahman” demanded.

“Everyone says, ‘Any child could make a cup of tea,’” he said. “But every cup of tea depends on the whole universe being there. For the tea to exist, it needs the sun and the moon. It needs the earth to be there. He made water, He made the container to hold it, He made the leaves to grow. When we were born, everything was there, just waiting for us. Every cup of tea depends on the whole universe.” I couldn’t decide whether this logic was oppressive or inspiring. I rather thought it was both, like the satisfying ache of stretching after a session hunched over a laptop.

After the seventeenth century, with the rise of European colonial rule in many Muslim countries, women’s scholarship declined.

“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.”

Denying women access to the mosque, like denying them other rights, was simply clinging to customs, not faith, said Akram. In the case of education, he’d gone further: preventing women from pursuing knowledge, he said, was like the pre-Islamic custom of burying girls alive. Stifling their potential makes the current status quo no better than the jahiliyya, the Arabic term for pre-Islamic ignorance. “I tell people, ‘God has given girls qualities and potential,’” he said. “If they aren’t allowed to develop them, if they aren’t provided with opportunities to study and learn, it’s basically a live burial.”

Khadija emerges as an impressive presence, but it is Aisha who shimmers, lifelike, on the pages of the early Muslim histories. Her voice carries across the centuries, preserved in 2,210 hadiths. And what a voice: bell-clear and courageous, one can hear it, should one we choose to listen, pronouncing on Islamic traditions on matters from prayer to trade to sex.

Some fourteen hundred years on, Aisha remains not just a role model but a red-blooded human, at once laudable and yet reassuringly flawed. We see her giving away the last scrap of food in her house—a grape—to a beggar, but we also hear her jealousy of her co-wives.

For Leila Ahmed, in her authoritative book Women and Gender in Islam, it is the centrality of women in Islam’s core texts that sets Islam apart from other monotheisms: “How many of the world’s major living religions incorporate women’s accounts into their central texts, or allow a woman’s testimony as to the correct reading of a single word of a sacred text to influence decisions?”

Some scholars have read the Battle of the Camel’s defeat as proof that women aren’t meant to be leaders. Not the Sheikh. Aisha’s tenacity, and expansiveness to the women of the victors suggested another lesson to him: “When you make a mistake, move on!”

Rarely, in my experience, does this gender apartheid seem to do what it’s designed to: turn one’s thoughts away from the opposite sex during lectures. As my mother once reported, on returning from an orthodox Jewish wedding, where women and men sat on separate sides, barriers actually seemed to heighten one’s awareness of the opposite sex, rather than tamp it down. I remember hearing a story about a Pakistani scholar who was asked why Islamic cultures were so intent on keeping men and women separate. “Why?” he asked. “Why, to boost the birthrate, of course!”

😭😭

Nothing gets people thinking more about sex than gender segregation, I muse,

Having heard their arguments against the practice, he had gone back to the sources, and had found an eighth-century judge and jurist, Ibn Shubruma, with a sound fatwa against the practice of child marriage. Ibn Shubruma argued that the issue hinged on a woman’s autonomy. When girls reached puberty, they could choose whom to marry. By being married in childhood, this choice was taken away from them. Akram added to this argument, stating that the oppression and injustice occurring within child marriages today emphasises the need to oppose it at the juristic level. The classical legal argument, bolstered by the modern examples of injustice that Arzoo and Mehrun had brought to his attention, changed his mind: “I’ve learned from these girls,” he said. The mostly male crowd was stunned. For a sheikh to declare that he was changing his mind was unusual enough, but for him to do so after debating with two women students?

“Write a book,” he urged Arzoo. “Women were not so present when these legal opinions were being written. You must write a book.”

How ironic, I later mused, that so many outsiders see Islam as a matter of cast-iron rules, of binding fatwas and unforgiving bans. As the year went on, I was repeatedly surprised by the broadness of its intellectual framework. This intrinsic flexibility could be used for good and ill alike: Islamic laws were only as humane as the Muslims interpreting them.

I wondered how much her niqab had been a halal form of teenage rebellion. Had it been a version of a Goth hairdo or a heart tattoo? A declaration of self, a gentle press against the boundaries of her childhood? But then I checked myself: simply flattening the niqab to an adolescent fashion statement stripped it of anything sacred. Not that all hijabs are about submitting to God. Those with fake Calvin Klein logos on them suggest a submission to the market. For the women wearing both hijab and skinny jeans, a headscarf is not necessarily about modesty but perhaps represents a personal style signature.

Still, my mother applauded Virginia Woolf’s critique of nineteenth-century family life. In class, she’d parse the writer’s disdain for the Victorian ideal of the “Angel of the House,” obedient, pure, self-sacrificing. At home, she’d press a copy of A Room of One’s Own on me with touching urgency, echoing Woolf’s call to young women “to go about the business of life,” to shuck off the provincialism of confinement in drawing rooms and family life because “no human being should shut out the view.”

“People want justice,” he said. “Feminism wants justice for women. Where Muslims aren’t doing justice for the women, these movements will come. If women don’t get the respect they deserve, we cannot complain if they seek it out in feminism. If women are suffering, they will.”

“Let us start by talking about the chapter as a whole,” he said gently. “If you read the sura from the very beginning, you will find that it is actually defending women.” As Akram explained it, “An-Nisa” was a sura that protected women, not punished them. It laid out the approved treatment of weaker members of society, such as orphans, war widows, and women in general. Between its dictates, the sura reminds people to fear and to obey God. These warnings, embedded in a chapter concerned with the rights of the weak, are a rhetorical form of protection, explained Akram. “Clever people, or people with power, they always can interpret law in their own ways,” he said. “So God reminds people, ‘Fear Me.’ Now we know, in your house, if you do injustice to your wife, maybe she cannot take you to court … but there’s another court.” He pointed upward. “The Lord knows what’s happening.”

“If a woman wants to become a mufti, if she wants to become a scholar, or wants to work: she can have all these positions. It’s just in the house that the man is guardian. Under God’s law, men and women have the same rights and responsibilities. The family is the only place where they have different ones. It is a secondary matter.” “Maybe secondary for him,” I caught myself thinking. “Not just because he’s a man, but because he’s a believer.” For Akram, equality didn’t hinge on who does the dishes, but on equal grace from God:

By going on umra, the two mothers were traveling to the very spot where one of the great heroines of the Quran, Hajar, had trusted God to save her baby.

For the Sheikh, Heathrow’s terminal 5 was no different from the rest of the planet. He regarded this world much as many people do airports: a way station to endure in order to reach one’s true destination. A place to navigate, as best you can, through its lines and officialdom, to get where you’re really going. “We belong to God,” says the Quran, “and to God we return.”

“No, really! Like when I hear Muslims complain about why America always supports Israel. They think it’s not consistent with their support of democracy and human rights. But it is consistent, because they are supporting what is in their own interests. If you look at it that way, it’s very consistent!” It was the first time I’d ever heard Akram mention the Israel-Palestine dispute. It was something I’d always assumed was a core issue for Muslims. Not for Akram. Like the struggles in Kashmir and Syria and Afghanistan, he left this Middle East conflict to the capitalized-M crowd. For Akram, fighting over bits of earth was far less compelling than mapping out hell or paradise. Lobbying for Muslims in Parliament was fine, if one went in for that sort of thing, so long as one didn’t sacrifice taqwa in the process. Political gains are transient, but the afterlife endures. For Akram, Muslims’ real rewards lie not within the pre-1967 borders of Palestine, nor in any Muslim state. Indeed, they lie no place on the planet, but in the infinite space afforded a single soul by God.

????

I called the Sheikh to ask about justice. “It’s the basic tenet of Islam, right?” I asked. A pause. There was justice, ultimately, he said, but it would not necessarily arrive in this life. Allah would provide it in the Hereafter. In Islamic political circles, rather too much can be made of it, he said, and that hurt Muslims. “Think of Palestine,” he suggested. “We have no doubt that there has been wrongdoing against the Palestinians by the Jews. But one has to really think about helping what is a very weak community. The way to help is not to bring justice.” “No?” “No. If you insist on justice, then the weak community becomes weaker, because those in power won’t give it. They will just hate them more.” “But what can Muslims do without seeking justice?” I asked. Compromise, said the Sheikh. That will bring peace, which in turn will give a battered community the time and space to heal. “Weak people, if they don’t admit they are weak, it’s going to destroy them more and more,” he noted. “Some people say, ‘When we make peace, we accept injustice.’ I’m saying, when we make peace, we buy time.” The Quran, he reminded me, says “Peace is better.”

omg no.

Besides, fighting for justice never gets you peace, he said: “Look at the people in Palestine and Kashmir. They need space and time to do something, to build something. They need to get education. If they keep fighting for justice, they will lose more—and not even get that.” What at first appears to be weakness might ultimately prove to be strength. Take the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, he suggested. The incident occurred in 628, when the Prophet, then based with his followers in Medina, was still at war with the Quraysh of Mecca. Despite the fact that the ruling Quraysh still controlled the Kaaba, Muhammad declared that he would go to Mecca for umra. Fourteen hundred followers decided to accompany him, even when he said he would not bear arms. It was a brave decision, since the Quraysh had been trying to kill the Prophet for six years. But a few miles outside the city, at a site called Hudaybiyah, Muhammad’s camel sank to its knees, refusing to get up.

“The Quran calls the Treaty of Hudaybiyah a victory,” said Akram. “Even though it was not in favor of the Prophet, he gained time. He could make contact with other Arabs. Peace gave him so much of an opportunity.” Sadly, today’s Muslim leaders are rarely strong and supple enough to compromise, he said. “If the Palestinians made peace, they could rebuild. Their children could get education. All this time, all this fighting and this and that. So many youths have been killed.”

I’d meant it. He is not a radical. Or rather, not their kind of radical. His radicalism is of entirely another caliber. He’s an extremist quietist, calling on Muslims to turn away from politics and to leave behind the frameworks of thought popularized by Islamists in recent centuries. Akram’s call for an apolitical Islam unpicked the conditioning of a generation of Muslims, raised on the works of Abu l’Ala Maududi and Sayyid Qutb and their nineteenth-century forerunners. These ideologues aimed to make Islam relevant to the sociopolitical struggles facing Muslims coping with modernity. Their works helped inspire revolutions, coups, and constitutions. But while these thinkers equated their faith with political action, the Sheikh believed that politics was puny. He was powered by a certainty that we are just passing through this earth and that mundane quests for land or power miss Islam’s point. Compared with the men fighting for worldly turf, Akram was far more uncompromising: turn away from quests for nation-states or parliamentary seats and toward God. “Allah doesn’t want people to complain to other people,” he said. “People must complain to Allah, not to anyone else.” All the time spent fulminating, organizing, protesting? It could be saved for prayer. So unjust governments run the world? Let them. They don’t, anyway. Allah does, and besides, real believers have the next world to worry about. So the Saudis require you to wear a hijab? Wear it. So the French government won...

This is such an insane stance I’m so sorry

The major problem with Islamists, said Akram, was their tendency to make Islam more about political struggle than piety.

A child of postpartition South Asia, the Sheikh had been raised when memories of the region’s struggle for self-determination were still fresh. The high hopes for a separate utopia for Muslims? The bloodshed over a country they could call their own? All they had brought the Muslims was Pakistan. In the run-up to South Asian independence, “there was so much writing against the British, how they wanted their own countries, one for Hindus, one for Muslims,” he said. “But if the real problem is the British, why do Hindus and Muslims want to come to the UK? The children of those people who fought for independence from the British, all are coming here! All are coming to live in Britain!”

Hmm I see why he may have this stance bc of personal history. I still hate it and there’s reasons why people would immigrate and that’s not an end all question. I would assume that as an academic he should be able to parse that. This makes me think that he’s not so interdisciplinary as he was portrayed to be in the beginning of the book despite his Oxford career he’s just another moulana.

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.”

Many people mourn every day in America, but it is often a lonely place to do so. There’s a heavy pressure to heal, to get back in shape to pursue happiness. Death is forced underground, or into encounter sessions with grief counselors or priests. Death felt too irrevocable, too unfixable, for the land of the people who tend to look on the bright side, home of the self-helped and self-made. In Pakistan, death was allowed out of the closet. Because I was looking for it, I found it everywhere. In grisly newspaper headlines about tribal wars and honor killings. At the cocktail party, where a socialite told me how her fiancé had gone out for cigarettes and never returned, killed in a car crash. At the Lahore Museum, in a statue of Buddha, rendered so skinny that the stone carver had seemed to place the bones outside the flesh. At night, I found myself telling a casual dinner companion about my father’s death—and even as I did so, I knew that such talk from a near-stranger was as irrelevant, intimate, and unappetizing as finding a hair in your soup. Yet my date was polite, dipped his bread into yogurt, nodded, chewed, swallowed: “Ah, yes. My own father was killed in a tribal war when I was six. Luckily, my uncle raised me.” And then he craned his neck to find the waiter, as though being an orphan was as minor an inconvenience as a dish without salt.

The three men met a shepherd passing with his flock. One of his companions, who spoke excellent Arabic, greeted the old man, asking, by way of conversation, where he was going. “We belong to God,” the shepherd replied, “and to God we return.” On hearing this, Bewley decided to convert, and did so the following day.

When Akram left, I felt oddly bereft. He’d gone to his mosque, and I was left, like my father before me, to admire the beauty of Islamic cultures without enjoying the full expanse of belief. 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.