If the Oceans Were Ink Quotes

“Anybody who forces people to change their beliefs, they are not a teacher. Learning should come from understanding properly, not from being forced.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“This freedom people talk about, to buy whatever they like, wear whatever they like, drink and so on, this is not good for the people," he later told me. "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.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“Too often the meaning of the hijab is taken as clear and unequivocal, like an on-off switch, a neat binary code. A Muslim woman is “traditional” if she wears one, “modern” if she doesn’t. “Oppressed” if she wears one, “liberated” if not. Scarf on: “devout.” Scarfless: “moderate,” or, who knows? Perhaps even “secular.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“The Sheikh chose his words to chill any romantic illusions in the room. "Very often, people think, 'I have fallen in love with someone,'" he began. But all too often, love proved to be mere desire. Allah had put sexual impulses into the hearts of humans in order to continue the propagation of our species. But like other basic human urges, the desire for sex with someone can't last. Once it is quenched, warned the Sheikh, it subsides: "If you marry someone because of desire, your desire will go down. Just like when you are hungry, and you eat, the desire for food goes down. Desire, by nature, is something that diminishes. Love, by nature, grows.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“On 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 symbolised the cycle of a Muslim's life, the steady bit 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.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“When I was eleven years old, I bought a tiny book containing a verse from the Quran from a stall outside a Cairo mosque. The amulet was designed to be tucked into a pocket to comfort its owner throughout the day. I was neither Muslim nor literate in Arabic; I bought it not for the words inside but for its dainty proportions. The stall’s proprietress watched me bemusedly as I cooed over the matchbox-sized book. My family and I were living in Egypt at the time, and back at home I taped a bit of paper over the cover and crayoned a woman in a long blue dress, writing on top, “Jane Eyre by C. Bronte.” I then placed the book in the waxy hand of my doll, which sat stiffly on a high shelf in my Cairo bedroom. The”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“For the Sheikh, modest Muslims covering was not to render a woman absent or invisible, just "that they be present and visible, with the power of their bodies switched off.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“Later, when I asked him whether I'd offended him, he'd assured me I hadn't. It was simply that Muslims didn't hold with images of prophets, he explained. "To depict them limits them," he explained. "Out of respect for the prophets, we don't like to limit them." That upended my pat ideas of art's power. For Akram, pictures stunted the imagination rather than stretched it.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“Learning should come from understanding properly, not from being forced.” Once,”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“Allah doesn’t want people to complain to other people,” he said. “People must complain to Allah, not to anyone else.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“To behave differently just because someone is weaker or stronger than ourselves implies a weak understanding of our equality of being as creatures of the ... Creator”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“So is he a radical?” non-Muslims often asked when I told them about the Sheikh. “Not at all,” I’d say, assuming we were all speaking in post-9/11 code. “Of course not.”

And 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 popularised 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 facings Muslims coping with modernity. Their works helped inspire revolutions, coups, and constitutions. But while these thinkers equated 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, organising, 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.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“But a niqab was different. It was not a "choice" in the manner of the consumer economy. A visual obliteration of the self, a plain black niqab was a refusal to engage in everyday modes of self-expression. The woman who wore it chose to wear it because it connected her to something bigger than the self. It could be God. It could be a Muslim identity. But it wasn't a simple case of a teenage fashion choice, that was certain.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“Sometimes, I really feel very frightened." The Sheikh hesitated. "For myself. There is no guarantee that you will die a believer. It could be someone who thinks they are a believer is actually an unbeliever. Everything depends on God. Nothing is certain."

This uncertainty, not of God but of himself, felt reassuringly familiar. Secularists often assume that the faithful have the comfort of certainty. But the Sheikh's humility wouldn't allow him to trust in his own piety. Every time he prays, he adds a prayer asking God, once again, to let him die as a believer.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“So why do people get obsessed with following the schools of law?" I asked. "Why not just go back to the Quran?"

A wide, bright smile. "People can be lazy." Consulting scholars and obeying their rules was safer and easier, said the Sheikh. "You don't need to read or question, or think. You've got other people thinking for you. If you become open, it's a challenge." He glanced at his watch, checking to see how much time remained before the noon prayer. "You see, Carla, what's happened, really, is that we in the Muslim world have destroyed the whole balance. We've become obsessed with these tiny details, these laws. What does the Quran keep repeating? Purity of the heart. That's what's important! Why has cutting off a thief's hand - something it mentions once! - become of such importance to some people?”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“To really understand it, you'll need to know a lot," he said. "To understand the stories of the Prophets in it, you need to know your Bible stories."

I gulped. My knowledge of the Bible was cobbled together from Renaissance paintings and reading Paradise Lost in sophomore English.

To understand the text, you need to understand the context, the Sheikh continued. To make sense of the rules it sets down, you need to understand Arab society during the age it was revealed: "So if you don't know the customs and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad's time, you can't make sense of it."

My background in seventh-century Arabia was rudimentary, and my Arabic nonexistent.

The Sheikh beamed as he reached for his coat. "And of course, if you're lazy, you can't make sense of it.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“By digging up the buried tradition of women scholars, Akram has prepared the ground for radical social change. 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.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of 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 indivualism 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."

I'd never thought of Show and Tell as baby's first building block of individualism, but seen through Sumaiya's eyes, it suddenly seemed like an early foray into the culture of the self. The monogrammed towels, vanity license plates, and sloganeering tote bags would follow - a lifelong parade displaying one's own distinctiveness. If Western culture has the laudable goals of speaking up and standing out, these values also bring collateral damage: the cult of personalization.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“Modern Muslims often simply cling to the external signs of their faith: "People are busy worrying about their beards, or their headscarves," he observed. "So the faith becomes like their identity. It happens like this in every culture, every faith. The outer aspects to become more important, while the soul inside is forgotten." He paused, shook his head, and gazed mournfully out a the crowd. "At the end of the day, people are carrying around a dead body, with no soul."

"Why do Muslims have so much suffering, all over the world?" he demanded. "We are carrying the body of Islam! We don't have submission. We have got the law, but without the hikma - the wisdom - behind it. Religion hasn't come to give people an identity! Its purpose is not so you can say, 'We belong to this group.' But at this moment ninety-nine percent of Muslims treat religion as identity! But God does not like identity. He does not want people to be proud of belonging. He wants faith, and he wants action.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“Political action should never take the place of a Muslim's true work, which was practicing taqwa. Rather than agitating for change, one should be still and resolute while facing it. The rise and fall of presidents and world powers was inevitable, but faith outlasted them all.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“The problem with many Muslims today: they were too concerned with their immediate conditions, and not concerned enough with their taqwa. "For a long, long time, Muslims have been very concerned with the space. We think, 'If I had a better space, it would be better.' The Muslim reformers think, 'If we had the caliphate, it would be better. If we get a Muslim state, it will be better.' Are there Muslims states?"

Nods from the crowd.

"Are we better?"

Silence.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“Everyone wants passion," he conceded. But too much of it squeezed out room for God. "It means you are basically worshipping someone else than Allah." When it came to sex, his discussions weren't gummed up by romanticism or stifled by shame: lust was just an urge placed in humans by Allah for the sole purpose of procreation.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“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."

The jihadis tended to be far more Westernized, in a superficial sense, than the Sheikh and his fellow ulama. Contrary to popular belief, most of the jihadi extremists weren't trained in madrasas. Rather than studying the nuances of classical Islamic thought, their training tended to be secular and technical, in subjects like engineering, computer programming, or medicine.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“Having lost the presence of your loved one in daily life, you've only had them as 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 imagination grind through a painful game of found-and-lost, lost-and-found.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“There was justice, ultimately, he said, but it would not necessarily arrive in this life. Allah would provide it in the Hereafter. In Islamic politic 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.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“Just as trying to impose sharia law wouldn't make people into good Muslims, imposing the hijab wouldn't automatically confer modesty. Without fear of God and a true submission to Him, these outward displays of Islamic identities were just about showing off an identity, he explained, not about faith. "There could be people who follow sharia law, but they're not believers," he said. "Or they could be someone who doesn't cover, but they are believers," he said.

Covering your head required true commitment before it truly worked. "Clothes don't make your pious," he told his students. "If you're pious, the covering can protect you. But trying to force women into the house, or into the hijab, it's not going to make them pious.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“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.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“There was just a single power he cared about; God's. "To believe differently just because someone is weaker or stronger than ourselves," he later wrote, "implies a weak understanding of our equality of being as creatures of the...Creator.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“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. He sketched peaks and troughs in the air, as if plotting the rise and fall of sexism through history. “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” was reaching its crescendo above us. “So why do people get obsessed with following the schools of law?” I asked. “Why not just go back to the Quran?” A wide, bright smile. “People can”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

“As a nonbeliever, I knew I couldn’t replicate Akram’s ecstasy. As an English speaker without classical Arabic, I knew I’d lose the poetry of the original words. But a bit like the nun who, while drifting off to sleep, allows herself a few seconds of wondering about sex, I found that Akram’s description suggested the limitations of my own cozy secularism.”
― Carla Power, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran