The book chronicles their reconnection years later when the Sheikh agrees to mentor her on the Quran. He was a 27-year old scholar and she was a 24-year old reporter for Newsweek. Her mother was Jewish, her father a Quaker, and today she describes herself as a secular feminist.Ĭarla and the Sheikh met at Oxford a few years after 9/11. As a young child, her world view was opened wide to different cultures and religions. He took long sabbaticals and the family spent many months living in South East Asia and the Middle East. He ended up at Oxford and gained fame for his forty-volume collection of biographies of thousands of Muslim women scholars.Ĭarla is an American journalist whose father was a law professor who felt more comfortable living abroad. He was raised in a small Urdu-speaking village in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, went on to study at a prestigious madrasa in Lucknow, India where his earliest speciality was hadith. The two met in the UK but were from very different backgrounds. This memoir of her journey to understand the Quran with Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi as her guide is a very engaging story that asks (and answers) many of the questions I’ve had about Islam and the Quran. The Quran finally opened up to me - or I opened up to the Quran - when I found Carla Power’s book “ If the Oceans were Ink“. I occasionally open it to read a passage that comes up in conversations with friends from Gaza. The language (in my English version) is so stiff and formal, and the passages seem so obscure and irrelevant to modern day challenges.

I’ve thumbed through it but I honestly don’t have any interest in reading it cover-to-cover.

I have a copy of the Quran, one given to me by a friend in Cairo. An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quranīy Carla Power (2015) along with Islam – A Short History by Karen Armstrong (2000)

If the oceans were ink by carla power