When journalist Carla Power sat down in a café with Islamic scholar Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi to study the Quran, she confessed that, despite her degree in Middle Eastern studies, she had never read it. He replied, "Most Muslims haven't read it either."
Power and Akram first met over a research project at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Power is a liberal secular American with a Jewish mother; she grew up in St. Louis and various cities in the Middle East. Akram grew up in rural northern India, and has lived most of his adult life in the U.K. Twenty years after their first meeting, Power proposed a project that would become If the Oceans Were Ink: to study and discuss the Quran with Akram for a year, to understand its influence on the world and in his life, and to challenge what she calls her own post-Enlightenment "fundamentalist beliefs."
Akram is a conservative who promotes education for women, and has written an unpublished 40-volume biographical dictionary of 9,000 Muslim women scholars. He teaches at madrasas and at Oxford, and values critical creative thinking rooted in the study of original texts. Power visits his home village, gets to know his family in Oxford, sleeps over at a mosque during Ramadan and reports on the family's umra pilgrimage. Their conversations break down stereotypes and illuminate fewer differences than she expected. Power displays the diversity and intellectual richness of the practicing Muslim world, and shows how much we have to gain from mutual understanding. --Sara Catterall