An Interview With Carla Power

Junior Rachel Sumption sat down with Carla Power, the final speaker in the Washington University 2014-2015 Assembly Series, to chat about her book, her perceptions of Islam, and her experience as a journalist writing about the Middle East.

Carla Power is the author of the new book If The Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran (Henry Holt, April 2015). Her Assembly Series lecture was titled, “Reading the Quran at Starbucks: An American Secular Feminist and a Traditional Muslim Scholar Find Commonalities.”

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I understand that you are in the throes of your book tour. What have been some of the most stimulating conversations you’ve had so far, or anything that you’ve learned on the tour for this book?

The night before I came here, an old friend of mine who has ended up as an actress on Homeland interviewed me at Strand Books in New York. She read the chapter on hajj [annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca], and she said, “You made it like any other travel…it seemed to me that the idea of people packing and being worried about packing 10 gallons of zamzam water with them, and getting down to the brass tacks of travel.” On one campus, I had an interesting Pakistani woman raise her hand—we were talking about which portions of the Qur’an were read literally or not literally—and she said, “You can’t read some bits metaphorically and not others. Can the sheikh read some things metaphorically but literally describe the fires of hell?” It’s above my pay grade, but I do think it’s a fascinating issue. I don’t know the history of moving everything towards metaphor, or if it happens in other religions as well.

The first third of your talk yesterday was about media misrepresentation of Muslims, particularly in Britain. Did you begin with this to outline a larger context for the environment that your book was entering into, or to explain a real purpose for why you wrote the book?

I think that the cramped space of like or different, moderate or radical, conservative or liberal, are not satisfactory categories…the lack of space that is allowed in mainstream media for nuance is why I was itching to dive deeper into this topic and write a popular book. The world needs more books on Islam, but I wanted to write a book that was accessible to the broadest possible audience and ‘bury the broccoli,’ so to speak.

How can journalists “engage the Muslim world,” in the words of Juan Cole, as a social and culturally significant region as well as a geopolitical one? Do you have any tips that you have learned through this writing experience for how journalists should empathically engage with writing about the Muslim world?

I think I’ll steal from the historian Simon Schama, who wrote a really good column after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. He said that if there’s any hope for integration and reconciliation between France’s Muslim and non-Muslim populations, we needed to cultivate what he called the ‘academy of the everyday,’ by which he meant talking to people in shops, cafes, and ordinary walks of life. It’s interesting: as young journalists we are taught to idolize ‘gotcha’ journalism that is made for interviewing people in corridors of power. For the Watergate generation, the idea was, ‘I’m going to keep democracy safe by holding up power structures to the light and questioning them.’ That’s fabulous, but I think now, in a world where understanding other viewpoints and cultures is increasingly important, there also needs to be a real effort to do the opposite, in a way—to listen, and really try to understand.

How do you navigate using catchy media buzzwords that typify the Middle East (“madrasa-trained,” for example) with respectful terminology and culturally competent portrayals of life in the MENA area?

I think it’s as if we have to unlearn these meanings—and with online stuff there’s more room to qualify—but we have such a long way to go with unpacking the difference between shari’a and fiqh, for example. If anything, one of the most useful things would be a series of “ten buzzwords that you thought you knew and didn’t.” and you could hand them out… However, it also has to do with visual representation. After 9/11, all we saw was students in lines rocking back and forth when we heard the word madrasa. It’s a matter of trying to explode these terms.

What are some of the misconceptions about Islam in America/the West that you wish you could publicize or combat?

Extremists of all stripes tend to use shari’a as a stand-in for fiqh. Shari’a is not a brittle, unchanging set of laws much like a constitution, but rather “the path to the water,” or general mores that one is striving to follow. Whereas fiqh, (they are often used interchangeably) is medieval jurisprudence which often forms the backbone for so-called “shari’a law.”

The distinction, which is so important to Muslim feminists, is important because there is confusion between the divine shari’a and its man-made scaffolding; fiqh which was made by medieval men trying to interpret this divine law. Feminists like Amina Wadud and Ziba Mir-Hosseini are now going back and saying, “This is man-made. Let’s go back to the shari’a, which is divine, and points us toward equality and justice.”

Do you think that neo-ijtihad by women will help create more equitable gender norms, or is this process futile without cultural change? Is this process only feasible in diaspora settings?

I wouldn’t purport to be an expert on how it’s playing out on the ground, but it’s now an irony that Muslims are no longer in the diaspora. They are born and raised American or British.

For example, you could be sitting in Kansas and work on Musawah’s QiWi Project, and be writing to a cousin in Pakistan. Arguably, Muslims in the West are better educated and have greater access to technology and classic texts than their counterparts in the Muslim-majority world may have. People realize this – It’s not just feminist intellectuals. I remember soon after 9/11 when interviewing conservative Muslims, they would say that the best place in the world to be a Muslim is Britain.

A common concern with sharing differing worldviews with other individuals is the pitfall of assimilation: where people search for commonalities without appreciating their unique features and the lived experience behind them. Do you think that the ultimate goal of your journey was to understand Nadwi’s view, to find the similarities between your two views, or otherwise?

That’s a really great question, this whole binary of like or different. When I wrote news stories, I was covering difference: extremists, jihadis, or issues with the veil. But when I wrote features articles, they were ones that I very consciously chose because I wanted to explode the stereotypes like the strongman and the muffled woman. It reminded me of these celebrity magazines, where you see the headline, “Stars are just like us!” Muslims were just like us… It was a step in the right direction, but it didn’t allow for the traction that is really necessary for a deeply humanistic understanding of like and difference or really understanding like and difference and not trying to map someone else’s worldview onto your rubric. There were things that I found very difficult to accept to accept in Sheikh Akram’s worldview, much as I respect him.

That was the great thing about doing the book, all of these things that I know intellectually, they’re not like rocks or the ocean. They’ve been fought for, and that’s why I’m cautiously optimistic.

What are some of the primary differences that you see in perceptions of Islam between Britain and the US?

In the US, two things seem to be taken out of the equation: there’s no colonial history at work. It’s arguable that we have a neocolonial history, but that’s another question. You also have a very different demographic. Folks that have come here until relatively recently, second and third generations of Muslims who came here in the 60’s and early 70’s, are the sons and daughters of people who came over here in the 60’s and are doctors and lawyers, and university professors, is a very different situation than that in Britain. You have the socioeconomic difference. Also, in the United States, you are also an American far faster than you are a European or a Briton. You’ve got these factors at play as well.

You mentioned in an earlier audio presentation that you had a deeper understanding of “Islamic culture” after embarking on your journey. Could you explain what you mean by that, and give some thoughts about how culture intersects with religious belief in Muslim-majority countries?

You’ve got to problematize the idea of an “Islamic culture,” there are tons of Islamic cultures, but one thing that was brought home to me was that a friend of mine says that, “What never gets explained properly to non-Muslims who have never traveled in the Islamic world is the concept of adab, or Islamic etiquette.” Particularly in South Asian Islam, the polite courtly dispute and humaneness in dealings with others. The modernists, partly because they were reacting to colonial situations and wanted to use Islam as a means of resistance to Western imperialism and partly because of the decline of old Islamic structures, have a harshness about the Saudi-influenced notion of global Islam that is very tough and brittle. Spending time with the sheikh, he really is from an old time; he really swerves away from the discourse of opposition.

Particularly in American contexts, something that I would hear again and again, particularly from young, idealistic college students in the 90’s… they would say, “Our parents came to this country and didn’t practice proper Islam because they had cultural baggage. We have a clean breast of it: We have a clean slate, and we can strip it of culture and just practice pure Islam. But we have a culture here…even then, I could see the difference in culture between Berkeley, California Muslims and East Coast Muslims. Culture is there, and anybody who tells you that you can strip away a cultural context is, I think, misguided.

If you flip it around and see it this way: one of the great reasons that Islam was so successful was because it was adaptive, and it was a simple, pure message that anyone could adopt. As long as other cultural practices did not interfere with the practice of believing in one God and following some basic rules, then it was fine. It was one of Islam’s great strengths, surely. Culture is porous…the corollary to that is those that say, “There is one shari’a law,” but how can you say that when there is such great variance across the Muslim world?

Is there a part of the Qur’an that you spent time with over the course of the year that you think differently about now than you did before?

I have to say, I’m not as focused on the deep scriptural reasoning side of it, but for me, the chapter that revolutionized what it means to be a migrant in Islam is Sura Youssef. The sheikh see it as a kind of metaphor for the way a Muslim could live in a non-Muslim environment. Youssef is thrown in a well, he gets enslaved in Egypt, he resists the lascivious wife of his slave master, and he ends up a very important counsellor because he tells the king’s dreams. It’s a sort of migration story…His teaching of this was about how as an immigrant and a pious Muslim, you can’t exactly control the space you are in. You could be pumping gas in Oklahoma, or living under a secular despot, but his political quietism is like this…What you can control is your own personal piety and your own relationship with God. I previously read into the “uprooted” story of migrants in Europe, and there is a particular bundle of preconceptions about migrants that we have there. I suddenly realized that if you are pious and you are focused on returning again and again to taqwa [Arabic term for “piety” or “fear of God”], it doesn’t matter where you are. It sews the world into a whole in a way that secular thinking about migration doesn’t allow us to.

But nobody talks about Sura Youssef!

It is an interesting space to be occupying as a white secular feminist writing a book about the Qur’an. I think you’ve tried to show that you aren’t the one single authority on it.

I would hate to be. I wouldn’t claim at all to be an authority on the Qur’an – the sheikh is an authority on it. But there’s an idea of, “where are the moderates?” We know that there are millions and millions of them, but it’s hard for them [Muslims] to get into print.