Inside the Qur’an — an author’s journey to the heart of Islam

Interesting interview with Carla Power, a former Newsweek journalist who studied the Qur’an over a year:

You describe movingly your father’s terrible and untimely death. How did that change your views on faith?

My father was murdered in Mexico in 1993. His death was the first time I saw the glimmering of the friendship that was going to happen with Sheikh Akram Nadwi. I ran into him in the office at Oxford and told him what had happened. He stood up and started reciting a poem from the Pakistani philosopher poet Muhammad Iqbal, an elegy to his mother. ‘Who will wait for my letters now? Who will wait for me in the night to return now?’ It was the most comforting thing I heard in the months of mourning. The notion that grief and death are universal and part of life was tremendously comforting. Later I realized what was holy to me as a secular humanist: connecting to other people who are different from you. If I do believe in something that is holy, it is that. The idea of recognizing and accepting differences is also a Qur’anic value.

Sheikh Akram has written a biographical dictionary of 9,000 female scholars in Islamic history. It seems extraordinary because I doubt most people can name even one.

The stereotype is a grey-bearded man in a mosque. But he found women who were riding across Arabia on camelback and horseback to do lecture tours. He found a woman in Samarkand who was issuing not only her own fatwas but writing fatwas of her less-talented husband. These are unthinkable freedoms for many women in this day and age. I thought that these women were forgotten for the same reason Western women had been until recently, that women’s history had been buried because it was mostly males writing about the corridors of power. But in the Muslim context there was another reason: Muslim notions of modesty and not putting women’s names in the public space.

What did the Qur’an reveal to you?

When I sat down for my first lesson with the sheikh I thought I would read the book and understand it like a good schoolgirl. But through the course of our lessons I realized it was so much bigger. We would discuss and debate the Qur’an and the hadith, the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad. To call the Qur’an a book would limit it to a human-made notion of what learning is. The only way I could see it in the end was a return, again and again, the 35-times-a-week prayers that many Muslims do. The Qur’an is a place you return to and learn of your God.

… You considered converting to Islam but didn’t. Can you talk about that?

A lot of my Muslim friends said, ‘Ah it starts by reading. You are going to convert, we know it.’ But I couldn’t make that leap. I found bits of the Qur’an were absolutely beautiful but I couldn’t make the interpretive leap that one has to. I admire it, I admire Islam but it’s not a bridge I can cross.

Inside the Qur’an — an author’s journey to the heart of Islam | Toronto Star.