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

by Carla Power

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.