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

by Carla Power

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”