Photography by Jamie Smith
The daughter of a Jewish feminist and a Quaker law professor, Carla Power lived in Iran, Afghanistan, and Egypt during her father’s sabbaticals from Saint Louis University’s law faculty. “He flattened the world for us,” says Power, who continued the travel as a correspondent for Newsweek and now covers Muslim societies and global social issues for Time. For her new book, If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran, she spent a year interviewing an Islamic scholar, Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi, in London, absorbing his eight-hour classes in the Quran, and traveling with him to Mecca and India.
Brilliant idea. But were there any days when you regretted it?
Oh yeah, lots. We weren’t sitting around singing “Kumbaya.” I kept wanting him to completely renounce child marriage. Eventually he did—two of his brilliant women students, both physicians, were able to argue him around. But for a long time, he was like, “Look, this is what happens. You have to understand the cultural context.” The year was this roller coaster ride: “Oh, good, you qualified that.” “Oh, no, you didn’t qualify it.” It really was a kind of brinksmanship.
Isn’t that what the scholar Hamza Yusuf told you was eroding with the decline of the traditional madrasa system?
Yes! That high-minded, tolerant, polite form of debate is gone. And that’s one of the many, many tragedies in the Islamic world.
Um…it’s eroding in other worlds, too.
Well, that is true! The debating societies of the 19th century, you don’t get that on Twitter.
Do you think he ever regretted saying yes?
I think he was very nervous when he brought me—an American woman, on her own—back to his village in India and asked me to speak at the madrasa. I now realize how brave that was on his part. He didn’t tell me what to say. But I was taking a photo, and he leaned over and said, “Could you not? Everybody’s waiting for you to make a mistake.”
Why did he risk his reputation?
He sees the problems with ISIS and Boko Haram, and he says, “We are only hurting ourselves. We have to live peacefully.” He got tired of listening to what he thought was lazy and bitter rhetoric.
Would you describe him as a conservative or progressive?
The really conservative think he’s terribly liberal, and progressives think he’s terribly conservative. He’s neither here nor there, and he likes it that way.
Where does he catch the most flak?
I think when he criticizes traditions that people hold very dear in the migrant community, like the niqab, the veil enveloping all but the eyes. He doesn’t criticize; he says, “Look, that’s culture, that’s not Islam.”
Did any of his attitudes surprise you?
I remember going to his lecture on women-related laws: Here he was in front of a room of mainly teenage girls, talking about wet dreams and nail polish and menstrual periods! But [despite its strictures] Islam is very clear-eyed about sex and not ashamed in the way the Christian tradition is. It’s more open, in a strange way, despite the notions of modesty and being against premarital sex.
And his own research turned up almost 9,000 women who were scholars of the Quran.
I really believe he does not judge people by gender. He’s pushed all his daughters to get graduate degrees. That said, he also has a very unreconstructed notion that women are in charge of household and the education of the children. He’s been a tremendously involved father, but there’s a definite division of labor.
What’s his view of sharia?
He lives, personally, a life bounded by sharia, but he’s not waving a sword, saying, “We will cut off people’s hands if they steal.” He says you can impose Islamic laws when you have a proper Islamic nation, but there is no proper Islamic nation now, so it’s a moot point.
Was it hard for you to find the right tone to take?
It was trying to find the middle ground between being a doormat and arguing all the time! I wanted to be as honest as possible—honest about my motives, and honest about what I had problems with. So not just dumbly nodding my head—but on the other hand, I still wanted him to talk, and not make our time about me trying to change his mind. Which I really couldn’t do anyway!
Did you use any tricks to avoid your own biases?
It wasn’t that I wanted to avoid bias—I knew it was there. I wanted to map where my bias kicked in. I would ask again and again, “Do you really think I’m going to hell?”—hoping I had misheard because his English is heavily accented!
Which is a good excuse to keep asking…
Exactly. Overall, though, there was an immersive quality, a suspending of disbelief, because these were eight-hour lectures. And then afterward, I would go home and say, “Hmmm. That was interesting.” It’s the old reporter’s trick: absorb, absorb, absorb, and re-think or question later.
Did it hurt your feelings that he didn’t think you’d be saved?
No. I was touched that he was genuinely worried for me. In fact, I wonder whether his feelings are hurt that I don’t seem to be able to take the flames of hell all that seriously.
How did writing this book change you?
Having never really thought about what it was like to lead a God-centered life, I got the occasional glimpse of how wonderful that could be. I didn’t convert—I still am the same old wishy-washy wouldn’t-that-be-nice secular humanist. But what resonated was the beauty of being grateful. And of passivity. As Americans, we’re like, “We can change things.” There was something wonderful about being reminded that there are some things beyond your control, and you just have to do the best you can. I know that falls flat—“You had to sit with an Islamic scholar for a year to learn that?” But realizing how having the self at the center of your life is such a Western thing—to see an entirely different way of life, where you are not about being an individual, you are about being a slave of God—was a real wakeup call to me. I saw that the cut and thrust of individualism was only one way of looking at life, and there was something quite lovely about this other way of looking at how to be a human being.
What was the most surprising thing the Sheikh ever said to you?
"After I told him my father had been murdered in Mexico, the Sheikh put his pen down, stood up, and started reciting a poem, in Urdu. I didn’t understand a word of it until later—
Who would wait for me anxiously in my native place?
Who would display restlessness if my letter fails to arrive?
I will visit thy grave with this complaint:
Who will now think of me in midnight prayers?
Watching him stand there, in the fading afternoon light, reciting these words—it was the most comforting thing someone said to me.
Even before you knew what it meant?
Yes. It was comforting precisely because it was in another language, and from another culture. It was a reminder that death—and grief—are universal.
At the end of the book, you wrote, “Studying the Sheikh’s faith had allowed me to practice mine.” Meaning…?
For me, the spark of the divine is when you connect with other people. When your humanity connects with theirs. So the ability to sit and find common ground with somebody who is so radically different from me was a year of practicing my own faith. That, to me, is why we are on this Earth.
