By Taha Ali

A WESTERN journalist, Carla Power has a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies, and has travelled extensively in the Islamic world. She has written for various publications including Time, Newsweek and The Guardian on Islamic society and culture. It was while working on a research project at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies that she encountered the alim, Shaykh Mohammad Akram Nadwi, who was to become a dear friend. Power spent a year learning the world view of Nadwi. The events of 9/11 took place, followed by sharp polarisation. Power recounts her utter frustration at watching the debate over religion get hijacked by extremists from both sides. And so her book If the Oceans were Ink was written, a response to a world going mad. This book is a treat for those who have long shaken their heads at the shallow and highly politicised coverage of Islam that dominates international mainstream media.

Power admits to another deeper, more personal, reason for her book: in the years spent reporting on Islam, she realised she had no real knowledge of the Quran itself, the fountainhead of Islamic culture. Calling herself a secular feminist, she confesses to being intrigued by the sheer majesty and power of the Quran. Power couldn’t help but wonder if she was missing out on a fundamental human experience by being unfamiliar with the text. Her choice of title for the book is the Quran’s own reference to the rich possibilities enclosed within:

“Say, even if the oceans were inkFor (writing) the words of my Lord, The ocean would be exhaustedBefore the words of my Lord were exhausted,Even if We were to add another ocean to it.”
(Chapter 18: Verse 109)

Nadwi is an ideal guide for Power’s journey into the study of Islam. Born in an obscure village in Uttar Pradesh, India, he mastered Arabic at the local madressah and secured admission at the Darul Uloom Nadwatul Ulama in Lucknow. This institution was founded in 1894 with a reformist agenda to bridge the gap between Islamic tradition and Western learning. From there, Nadwi’s career took on international dimensions. He has served as a research scholar at Oxford University for over two decades and has taught at the undergraduate level at the university. He has made frequent study trips to Damascus and Madina. As an alim, he is engaged with the UK community, lectures at mosques and issues fatwas, and is currently trying to set up a full-fledged madressah.

His story is very inspiring. Power notes, “The Shaykh’s near-seamless transition from a village prodigy to a global scholar is a stunning example of Muslim cosmopolitanism”. Nadwi seems to have successfully resolved the stark contradictions of being a traditionalist living in a modern world. He is equally conversant with Greek philosophy and Persian poetry and thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche.

In his work on cataloguing hadith literature, Nadwi noticed that the names of women kept coming up in the chains of transmission. He explored further and discovered several more. Intrigued, he drew up plans to write a small biographical dictionary, documenting these unknown female muhaddithat. He estimated there would be some 20 to 30 women. Research led him to the stunning realisation that he had unearthed an entire forgotten history, buried under centuries of cultural conservatism and stagnation. The planned single volume ended up as a staggering 40-volume compendium of the biographies of some 9,000 women scholars.

These women fundamentally challenge all our conventional notions of Muslim womanhood: they actively lectured, travelled in pursuit of knowledge, taught the Quran, transmitted hadith, and issued fatwas. One example is that of Umm al-Darda, scholar, muhaddith, and jurist, in 7th-century Damascus and Jerusalem. She used to deliver lectures in the mosque, debate with scholars, and pray shoulder to shoulder alongside men. Her students included the Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan.

Similarly, in the 14th century, students would come from far and wide to study under Fatimah al-Bataihiyyah who taught at the Prophet’s (PBUH) mosque. Another famed jurist was Fatima bint Yahya, whose husband, also a jurist, would consult his wife on tough cases. His students could tell by examining the fatwas: “This is not from you. This is from behind the curtain.”

So why did Islamic civilisation take such a sharp misogynistic turn? Nadwi blames Greek philosophy, specifically the authoritative influence of Aristotle who believed men had natural dominance over women. Participation of women in scholarly activities also diminished as Islamic education became more career-oriented after the 16th century.

The title of the book gives the impression that it was supposed to be an exploration of the Quran but it isn’t. Power only touches on the usual sensitive topics regarding rights of minorities and womenfolk. Instead, the second major contribution of this book is far more subtle. As Power deftly paints her portrait of Nadwi socialising with the UK Muslim community, meeting his students and friends, visiting his ancestral village in India, there emerges before us a type of Muslim who has grown exceedingly foreign in this day and age.

For one, Nadwi’s world view is firmly anchored in an all-enveloping awareness of God. All else springs from this essential orientation. This stance is the literal application of the Biblical proverb, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and the polar opposite of the Cartesian dictum, “I think, therefore I am”. Power is very sensitive to this grounding, and goes to considerable lengths to explore the nuances and implications, and how they clash with her own thoroughly Western outlook. She admits the stark inadequacy of conventional modernist labels to describe traditionalist thought: two-dimensional notions such as fundamentalist/moderate, liberal/conservative, and literalist/progressive collapse on closer examination.

Equally striking is Nadwi’s analysis of the problems confronting Muslims today. In his opinion, intellectual laziness has set in. Madressahs focus overwhelmingly on the ruling of authorities than on actual scripture itself. His own fatwas have raised reactions: it is permissible for women to cut their hair, prayer caps are not necessary (it’s a South Asian custom), etc. Mullahs in mosques sometimes ask him to avoid airing some of his opinions, especially his candid view that the exclusion of women from education and religious authority is comparable to the jahiliyya custom of burying female infants alive.

Nadwi is scathingly critical of the Islamist worldview of thinkers like Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutub, Maulana Maududi, etc. who have made politics central to the Muslim identity. Instead, as per the Quran, the pivot for the Muslim is simply purity of heart. “The Prophet (PBUH) is not calling people to get power, or to establish an Islamic government,” he says. “He’s teaching them one thing: to follow the plan of their Creator and to save people from the fire of hell.”

In Nadwi’s view, modern Islamist movements are symptomatic of a grand Muslim inferiority complex. Islamist ideology is a way for thoroughly dominated Muslims to convince themselves that Islam can also deliver the riches that the West has, i.e. they essentially want a Western state with an Islamic flavour. At the end of the day, it is all about power. He believes history supports this view: the few instances where Islamists have succeeded in forming a government, they have been far more focused on power than on actual governance.

In Nadwi’s case, this paradigm is inverted. He does not come across as defeatist or passive at all. Instead, the human drive for domination, conquest, and power, is turned inwards, that is, domination over self is preferred to domination over others. We recognise this as the greater jihad. 

If the Oceans were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran

(ISLAM)

By Carla Power

Holt Paperbacks, US

ISBN 978-0805098198352pp.