If the Oceans Were Ink

If the Oceans Were Ink is a 2015 memoir from Carla Power about her friendship with Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi and her quest to understand the Quran. The two debate and discuss their way through the text over the course of the year, each trying to understand the other’s perspective. Power is a writer for Time magazine and the foreign correspondent for Newsweek. She earned her graduate degree in Middle Eastern studies from Oxford.

Power writes that she came from an educated family and spent much of her childhood traveling the world. She learned about cultures different from her own, and as an adult, began working for the Centre for Islamic Studies in Oxford, England.

Her friendship with Akram began in an unusual way: in 1993, her father was murdered in Mexico, mistakenly identified as a drug dealer by a Mexican gang. Power was stunned by the news and happened to run into Akram, a co-worker at the time. He responded by reciting an elegiac poem by Pakistani poet and philosopher Mohammed Iqbal. She was so comforted by this gesture that they immediately became friends. Their friendship was considered unlikely: Power was an American journalist of Quaker-Jewish descent, while Akram was an Islamic scholar from India.



The book revolves around Power reading and learning the Quran from Akram for a year. Islam, and the Quran, are the subject of so much media controversy that Power decides to return to the original text and see what it really says, not what other people think it says.

The process overturns many of Power’s assumptions about the Quran and its teachings. For example, Akram specializes in hadith, the thousand sayings and actions of the Prophet Mohammed. Earlier in his career, he decided to write about female hadith scholars, assuming he might be able to find a handful of them throughout history. But during his research, he found there were over 9,000. And he published their stories in a biographical dictionary. There were women who gave scholarly lectures on Islam or issued fatwas.

Akram’s own perspective on life often surprises Power: he is unconcerned with the pursuit of money or even his own happiness. Instead, he responds to the difficulties of the world around him with prayer and acceptance. For Akram, fortune is something that can come and go. Faith alone is constant.



Through the year, Akram explains to Power that very few verses in the Quran have a definitive interpretation. Everything is subjective. That is how the text has come to be read or used in so many different ways, for good or bad. Different groups can find what they want to find in the book’s verses.

In contrast, Akram tells Power that the most important aspect of interpreting the Quran is keeping God at the center. Too many people, he says, put themselves at the center, and what they want to believe or see on the page. Instead, Akram believes, these people should consider what God is trying to say.

Power addresses a major criticism of the Quran, and of Islam: that women are veiled and shielded from view, not allowed in public spaces unaccompanied. Akram refutes the idea that this is part of the religion; he says it is a cultural perspective, not a rule dictated by religion. The Quran only says that women might not always be able to attend prayer at the mosque because of their duties at home. Cultural shifts have twisted that notion into something repressive, an attitude that women should not attend prayer at the mosque at all.



When Power and Akram discuss wearing veils, he firmly expresses his belief that veiling should be the woman’s choice alone. By wearing a veil, moreover, a woman gains a kind of freedom. It represents a way to remove themselves from sexualization and objectification.

Over and over, Akram—and Power herself—encourage thinking critically about the Quran, not simply memorizing its contents. Akram encourages her not just to study the words, but to ask questions and to go back to primary sources rather than simply believing what she reads.

The lessons Power takes away from her year of study surprise her. She initially approached the project as if it were a book report. But what she found in the Quran, and in Akram’s teachings, was so meaningful that she nearly converted to Islam by the end of the year. In the end, she sees the Quran as something to return to again and again, something she can learn something new from each time she opens it.



If the Oceans Were Ink was a critical success, with many readers praising her nuanced look at Islam, though others argued that she simply parroted one interpretation of the Quran rather than seeking out diverse perspectives. The book was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.