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

by Carla Power

To study with Akram was not just to cultivate a deeper understanding of Islam. It was to test the boundaries of my own faith: a zealous belief in the virtues of trying to understand what’s really foreign, and what just looks that way.

Muslims like him, and eager students like me, need to stand back for a panoramic view of the text. The careful reader couldn’t be distracted from its overarching messages and interlinking themes. Its very design was miraculous, one of the infinite signs of God’s grace.

As any child’s primer on world religions will tell you, Islam began as a desert faith. 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.

at the madrasa but was beginning to enjoy it. I like being the odd one out, having learned long ago the profoundly relaxing properties of being spectacularly out of place. Whether you’re the new kid in the fifth grade, or the only woman to have delivered a speech at Jamdahan’s madrasa, little is expected of you, and most lapses are forgiven. Like my father before me, I feel most at home when I’m away from it, freed from the expectations of my own culture.

had watched President Bush on television assuring America that we were attacked because “they hate our freedoms.” But the very question was misguided: everywhere I went in the Muslim world, our freedoms weren’t hated, but envied. The bitterness was not aimed at Americans, or our democratic values, as Bush claimed. It was at our callous misuse of power, our continued willingness to prop up dictatorships in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia that denied their people the very democracy we purported to want to spread. It wasn’t “us” they hated, but our policies.

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.

“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.”

“Hadith wasn’t a source of income for them, and they didn’t do it because they wanted to become famous. When they decided to learn, their reasons to do so were just for learning.” Purdah, argued Akram, kept their scholarship pure. For women, scholarship was a spiritual vocation rather than a career.

The Sheikh explained its dilapidation, in part, by the more general decline in Muslim intellectual confidence. The madrasa system languished, so patriarchal customs filled the vacuum. Flabby leadership from the ulama, many of whom have turned to politics rather than scholarship, left Muslims ignorant of their own history. “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.”

For Muslims, the Islamic past is not just a source of interest for historians but a blueprint for the present. Precedent, not innovation, guides the devout on how to live and behave. So Akram’s discovery of these women scholars isn’t simply an interesting bit of long-buried history, but a quietly eloquent argument for changing the status quo. “What he’s doing is revolutionary—which is perhaps an odd word to use in connection with a traditionalist scholar,” says Asma Sayeed, a history professor at UCLA and the author of Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam. While other Muslims—progressives and feminists—might question the Islamic patriarchy more forcefully, the Sheikh chips away at it from inside its traditions. He’s a madrasa-educated man, a conservative, whose interest in women scholars was formed by the tradition itself, starting through the lens not of gender, but of hadith.

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!”

But more fundamentally, the veil wreaks havoc on the standard secular notion of what is private and what is public. When a woman puts one on, her head is suddenly signaled as an erotic site. What secular society deems public is now made private, while one’s religion—what is in many Western societies considered to be private—is exposed for everyone to see.

“You Westerners make love in public and pray in private. We Muslims do exactly the reverse.”

Different paths to God were not just tolerated, but part of the divine design traced out by God. Religious differences were a source of strength, polishing belief as the faithful contrasted, compared, and competed to please God through kindness and piety. A sort of divinely sanctioned free market of faith.

As any migrant will tell you, a death at long distance has its own rhythms.

Many deaths feel unreal, but for the migrant in mourning, they’re doubly so. Having lost the presence of your loved one in daily life, you’ve only had them as a ghostly presence to begin with. Visits home and phone calls can bring them to life, but only temporarily. So after the call with the news comes, the long-distance griever has to resummon the love object in her mind, then lose the beloved again.

The gears of the imagination grind through a painful game of found-and-lost, lost-and-found. * * * At my mother’s memorial,

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.”

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