Viva Brighton Issue #36 February 2016

literature
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Carla Power
An American and the Quran
When I first began reading
Carla Power’s new book If the
Oceans Were Ink, I felt daunted.
Journalist Power’s book centres
on her journey through
learning the Quran, interweaving
stories of her friend,
the teacher and renowned
academic Sheikh Akram, with
the history of Islam, whilst
questioning how the Quran
might apply to contemporary
living. However, the writing
style and Power’s personal approach
allows for easy reading.
After several hours with my
head in the book, I looked up, exhaling deeply, as
though I had been holding in my breath to retain
the fascinating histories and ideas Power had
been feeding me.
When I meet Power for coffee (she lives in Brighton),
I bombard her with questions, starting with
the ridiculously broad “how can relations between
Islam and non-Islam be improved?” She politely
laughs, “I don’t have the answers! I would suspect
myself if I did.” She never set out to give answers,
it seems: instead she wanted the book to be “a
listening exercise… and what I feel is a very rare
thing, which is to sit and have a basic respect for
another and try as hard as possible to understand
their world view.” She suggests the same starting
point on a larger scale; “it starts person to person,
finding safe spaces for discussion.”
Throughout the book Power eludes to the
“luxury of looking at your culture through
another’s eyes”. With the Quran in mind, Power
has difficulty with aspects of Western living;
over-consumption and the
hyper-sexualisation of women
in particular (as a feminist, the
latter is nothing new to her).
Certain passages of the Quran
made her reconsider the individualism
that drives Western
culture: “it is grounding to see
yourself as ordinary and as part
of something much larger than
yourself. That goes against the
grain of Western living. And
time; how we rush to create
these fully formed projects
of human beings, this seems
increasingly alien.” Religion
need not be the only catalyst for looking at things
this way, but in this instance it offered Power a
framework.
Akram is also affected by others’ world views. In
one section, two of his female scholars insist that
he review his attitudes towards child brides and
he does: they cause him to alter his view drastically.
And the pair’s exchanges leave both of them
questioning the societies in which they reside.
There are certain issues Akram is steadfast about
but Power refuses to “rule out that in maybe five
years time he may change his mind.”
From the outside Islam is frequently painted as
rigid but Power illuminates its adaptability “...
it is what makes it both incredibly vibrant and
uncontrollable in a sense …the interesting thing
is its ability to be adaptable is what often gets it
into trouble... The exciting thing is, and I think
the thing that people don’t understand when they
keep saying ‘where’s the reformation?’ But it’s like
DUDES, we’re in it!!!” Holly Fitzgerald
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