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

by Carla Power

“What about the Taliban? What they do to women … In Saudi Arabia, women can’t drive. Under the Taliban, they couldn’t go anywhere without covering up…” The other guests, sensing a low hum of tension, began to gather their plates and ferry them to the sink. “They aren’t practicing Islam,” I replied, perhaps a tad too smugly. “That’s local or tribal custom made into national law. Yes, those laws and restrictions are terrible, but they’re not Islamic. All you have to do to find out that it’s got universal values—ones very much like yours and mine—is go back to the sources.”

One Jewish tradition holds that Rebecca married Isaac when she was three; scholars estimate Mary gave birth to Jesus around the age of twelve.

One may debate 4:34’s meanings, but one thing remains certain: men’s interpretations of the verse have made millions of women miserable.

As Akram explained it, “An-Nisa” was a sura that protected women, not punished them.

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.

In Saudi Arabia, a Wahhabi fear of promoting idolatry had led to the destruction of many early Islamic monuments. When the al-Saud tribes entered Mecca in the 1920s, they destroyed cemeteries containing graves of important early Muslims. More recently, Saudi efforts to accommodate the growing number of hajjis have wreaked havoc on early Muslim monuments. The expansion of the Grand Mosque has turned the house of Muhammad’s beloved Khadija into a bank of toilets; a Hilton hotel now sits where once stood the home of Abu Bakr, Aisha’s father and Islam’s first caliph.

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.

It appeared frequently in the Quran and revolved around the letter i in the word “Islam.” 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.

Still, in class after class, students asked how Muslims can defend Islam from slurs against it. “Musk smells sweet on its own,” Akram advised, quoting a Persian proverb. “You don’t need a perfume seller to tell you of its sweetness.”

the most successful Muslim states, whether the Mughals or the Ottomans or Muslim Spain, demonstrated tolerance toward other faiths.

When I asked the Sheikh about it, he cautioned that 5:51 wasn’t a blanket statement. Rather, it applied to a very specific group of non-Muslims at a particular moment in Medina when certain Jewish tribes aligned with the pagan Quraysh against the young Muslim community. “That verse came down when they were in war conditions,” he explained. “That verse is for when unbelievers have all the power, and yet still they oppose the Muslims, and persecute them, and don’t give them freedom.”

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

Real piety derives from imaan, an individual’s committed belief. “If your imaan is deep in your heart, the state and powers cannot take that away from you,” he said. But bring in a state-imposed Islam and “hypocrisy will come.”

“True freedom means freedom from desire. True freedom means freedom of thinking. If your mind just follows your desires—how to make more money, how to eat more, drink more, have more things—it’s really worse than slavery.”

Attention to context, both textual and historical, is all too often overlooked by jihadis and Islamophobes alike. Take the case of the so-called “Verse of the Sword”: But when the sacred months are past, then kill the idolaters wherever you find them, and capture them, and blockade them, and watch for them at every lookout. (9:5) Court scholars during the Muslim Empires cited this verse in fatwas supporting rulers’ foreign wars. Bin Laden used it in his famous 1996 fatwa declaring jihad on the Americans. The scholar Bruce Lawrence has described the sword verse as the “shibboleth, the battle cry” for jihadis. What the jihadis tend to leave out, however, is the verse’s second half: “But if they repent and practice prayer and give alms, then let them go their way; for God is most forgiving, most merciful.”

Contemporary jihads were worldly, not spiritual, said the Sheikh. The men waging them operated not from an excess of piety, but a lack of it: “It is just the Islamicization of violence,” he said. “People think they can use Islam to fight for land, or honor, or respect, or money. But these are not religious people. They are just following non-Islamic examples.”

An influential study examined the backgrounds of four hundred violent extremists and found that only 13 percent were from madrasas or Islamic boarding schools.

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.”

Jihad had very specific parameters, he said, sternly. One couldn’t harm women, children, or other noncombatants. The enemy’s crops and fields must be respected: “You can’t harm even a tree.” A jihad can be waged only by legitimate Islamic leaders operating openly, not by self-appointed guerrillas striking covertly. And jihad must not target fellow Muslims. “Those who raise their weapons against us,” said the Prophet Muhammad, “are not from us.” Today, the vast majority of the people dying in the name of jihad are Muslims.

The term that appears most frequently in the Quran, after “Allah,” is ilm, or knowledge. Islam began with the command, “Read.”

One day on the Berlin subway he looked around his carriage, at the prosperous passengers, at a man with a glittering diamond ring, at a woman with a mouth “fixed in a stiff semblance of a smile.” To Asad, they all seemed miserable. They were “without any faith in binding truths, without any goal beyond the desire to raise their own ‘standard of living,’ without any hopes other than having more material amenities, more gadgets, and perhaps more power.”

the burial, which Muslim tradition dictates should take place within three days.

white, the color for Muslim mourners.

Muslim condolence callers traditionally brought food.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon. “We belong to God, and to God we return.” Taken from the second chapter of the Quran, the phrase cradles the speaker, the listener, and the deceased together in a common destiny. Its power derives from its symmetry: our origin is our destination, in our end is our beginning.

“When a culture focuses on the outer aspects of a faith—like a headscarf—their religion just becomes about identity,” Akram cautions. “At the end of the day, people are carrying a dead body, with no soul.” Go back to the sources, back to your prayer mats, and make your faith your own, he counseled. Don’t do what everyone else does. Read. Think. Brush off the dust of tradition, and with it the certainties of your ancestors. True worship requires one to look past burqas, beards, and sharia laws, which too often are just the props, not piety itself. True worship was taqwa, consciousness of the Return.

One had to look back only three hundred years or so in Europe’s history, back before the Industrial Revolution, to find early marriages. No public schools, or truant authorities, or Rights of the Child manifesto, or underage statutes. My outrage may have burned, but it cooled slightly after 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.

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)