Capítulo 4
Journey to the Source: India's Islamic Traditions
To understand how a village boy from Uttar Pradesh became an Oxford scholar, Power accompanied the Sheikh back to his ancestral village and alma mater in Lucknow. Traveling on the Doon Express through the sepia-tinted landscape of northern India, she reflected on how their journey mirrored the intellectual paths of South Asian scholars they had researched together in Oxford.
The Sheikh was continuing a centuries-old tradition by building two madrasas in his village of Jamdahan-one for boys and one for girls-using money earned in Oxford. As the first person from his village to attend Lucknow's prestigious Nadwat al-Ulama, he wanted to prepare local children to follow his path. In six years, his madrasa had impressively sent twelve students to Nadwah.
After 9/11, Westerners came to view madrasas as "jihad factories" where students rote-learned the Quran and were taught to hate the West. While some fit this stereotype, many defied these assumptions. Power had seen madrasas offering English classes and progressive education. Akram's own madrasa included English language alongside standard classes on Arabic, Quran, and Islamic jurisprudence.
During her visit, Power was invited to address the all-male audience at the madrasa. As the only woman present besides the Sheikh's ten-year-old niece, she felt conspicuously out of place but strangely comfortable in her outsider role. The audience's questions were pointedly political: "Is American media controlled by Jewish people?" and "Why does America act against Muslim interests?"-revealing that for these villagers, Islam's intersection with the West was shaped by geopolitics rather than platitudes about shared values.
After her speech, Power was whisked to Akram's family home, entering the intensely feminine zenankhaneh (women's quarters). The house was built for purdah (gender separation), with women screened from the outside world except for a rectangle of sky above the courtyard. Throughout her visit, Akram remained absent from his family home, observing strict gender separation. "I don't like to mix with the wives of my brothers," he explained later in Oxford. "With me there, they can't laugh loudly, they can't talk freely."
Power glimpsed how purdah restricted both genders, though women bore the heaviest burden. His sisters and mother never ventured outside without niqabs or male escorts. In Oxford, purdah was practiced but less strictly. When the Sheikh has male visitors, they separate into different rooms, but there's more freedom, particularly for younger women. Sumaiya, Akram's second-eldest daughter, laughed at being asked if she could drive: "I could drive before my husband did!"
The journey culminated at Nadwat al-Ulama, Akram's intellectual home. The madrasa campus surprised Power with its beauty-black and yellow butterflies darting across green quads, a lemon-yellow Anglo-Indian style building with scalloped arches. Founded in 1898 during the decline of traditional Islamic education, Nadwah was deliberately designed to instill pride in Muslim scholars. Unlike its rival Deoband, which opposed British influence, Nadwah sought a middle path, supplementing Islamic sciences with Western subjects. Akram studied not only fiqh, Quran, and Arabic grammar, but also Shakespeare, Freud, and Sartre.
Capítulo 5
Faith in Migration: Building a Life Between Worlds
When Power worked at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in the early nineties, it was housed in a modest prefab building. One spring day, the Centre buzzed with preparation for Prince Charles's visit-red carpets, catering, security clearances. While administrators fluttered with excitement, Akram remained unimpressed, standing ramrod straight in his gray karakul cap and black sherwani as the prince mingled. His dignity stemmed from Islam's flattening of worldly hierarchies-there was only one power he truly respected: God's.
Akram's first autumn abroad was challenging. He bought practical items-a bus pass, bicycle, sturdy shoes, parka-and borrowed books on Christianity that shocked him with their portrayal of Jesus "either as a god, or as just another human being." Though prayers remained the same, he missed Nadwah's spiritual continuity where worship and study formed an unbroken devotional chain. When asked what he missed most about Lucknow, he simply replied: "True friendship."
Oxford's prestige neither daunted nor impressed Akram. While the Centre's administrators eagerly cultivated connections with the university establishment, donning academic gowns for High Table dinners, Akram only ventured into the university to use its libraries. He performed his duties at the Centre, then returned home to his real work. His calm acceptance of exile from Lucknow baffled Power's twenty-four-year-old American self. Raised on "the pursuit of happiness" and the "cult of specialness," she couldn't comprehend his unwillingness to return to India despite his homesickness.
Years later, Power understood what she'd dismissed as passivity was actually "muscular submission." When Akram taught the Quranic story of Yusuf (Joseph), she saw beyond her vague recollection of "a man with great clothes and horrible brothers." Akram found in this prophet's story the tools to endure wherever he found himself: humility, patience, and adaptability.
The Sheikh illustrated this with a simple diagram: a line representing your space (circumstances) and a circle representing your cycle of faith. While your space isn't in your control, your cycle is. Through taqwa (love and awe of God), any condition can improve. Yusuf never complained despite being thrown in a well, sold into slavery, or imprisoned on false charges.
This perspective offers comfort to migrants worldwide-from laborers in Dubai to gas station attendants in Texas. The practice of patience and faith gives dignity and meaning to lives far from home. Akram criticized Muslims who obsess over creating perfect Islamic spaces or performing showy gestures of piety rather than purifying their hearts. "When you have taqwa, you don't need fatwas," he explained. His own humility-traveling alone by bus, dressing simply-embodied this philosophy.
Capítulo 6
The Domestic Sphere: Family Life Through an Islamic Lens
The Sheikh's Oxford home reminded Power of pioneer life in "Little House on the Prairie"-a moral architecture built of privation, hard work, endurance, and fear of God. Their house was strikingly simple, with wooden floors and white walls adorned only with elegant calligraphy spelling "Allah." This simplicity reflected a sensibility of certainty, a worldview of streamlined spirit.
The Sheikh's wife Farhana, a moon-faced woman in her forties, initially struck Power as the self-sacrificing "Angel of the House"-serving lunch without eating herself until guests started. Born to farmers in a village near Jamdahan, her education ended at age nine, and she married the Sheikh at sixteen through an arranged match. Power mistakenly framed her as isolated and imprisoned by tradition, but later discovered she was actually a lively community member with her own sewing business and impish humor.
For the Sheikh, modesty was paramount in child-rearing. When his daughters earned good grades, he'd acknowledge them but always ask: "Is there anybody better than you?"-not from competitive instinct but to cultivate humility and God-consciousness (taqwa). Yet he never diminished his educational ambitions for his daughters, teaching them that the Prophet "never liked anyone who treated women differently from men."
The family life was structured around Islamic education, with mornings devoted to Arabic study and evenings to hadith and Quran. Weekends meant exploring Britain by car, while summers began with dawn prayers followed by badminton in the park. There were no birthday parties-only celebrations for real achievements like finishing the Quran. The Sheikh's parenting philosophy centered on patience (sabr): "The fruit should come when God wants. If you can control your desire, then you will get what you want."
While his daughters never experienced typical teenage rebellion or dating, they were given space to make choices within Islamic boundaries. Sumaiya, who met her husband through her father's hadith classes, valued the Islamic worldview that everything belongs to Allah rather than the Western individualism she saw in practices like Show and Tell. Despite the challenges of raising a colicky baby, she found comfort in Quranic recitation, particularly Sura "Al-Rahman," which reminded her of God's bounty and creation.
The Sheikh's sense of cosmic gratitude permeated everything-even seeing a cup of tea as dependent on the entire universe God created. While demanding high standards from his daughters in both secular and Islamic education, he broke from tradition by sending them to local schools rather than madrasas after finding girls' religious education lacking. His daughters' achievements, including graduating from his Islamic sciences course, reflected his commitment to women's education.
Capítulo 7
Recovering Women's Voices in Islamic History
While reporting on the Taliban's ban on women's education in Afghanistan in 1998, Power learned that Akram was uncovering a radically different Islamic tradition. He had discovered thousands of women hadith scholars throughout Islamic history, challenging the perception that Islamic knowledge was exclusively men's domain.
These women scholars were remarkably accomplished-many led cosmopolitan lives like Fatimah bint Sa'd al-Khayr, born to a Spanish Muslim father in western China, who studied across Asia before teaching in Damascus, Jerusalem and Cairo, dying at 78. The Sheikh found traces of these women tucked away in biographical dictionaries, travel books, private letters, and mosque records scattered across continents and languages.
Despite the bare-bones biographical details, these women were significant authorities. Umm al-Kiram Karimah taught Sahih al-Bukhari (second only to the Quran in importance) and attracted students from everywhere. Women scholars were known for their accuracy-none were ever accused of fabricating hadith, unlike men who sometimes invented traditions to flatter rulers.
After the 17th century, with European colonialism, women's scholarship declined as Muslim intellectual confidence waned. The Sheikh argues that denying women education is like the pre-Islamic custom of burying girls alive-"a live burial" of potential. His work has become revolutionary, providing historical precedent for Muslim women's education and religious authority today.
If anyone proves a pious Muslim woman need not be submissive, it's Aisha, the Prophet's third wife. A top Islamic scholar, women's rights champion, military commander, and fatwa-issuing jurist, Aisha's intellectual standing and religious authority were astonishing by any standard. She knew her exceptional status, noting ten things that set her apart from Muhammad's other wives, including being his only virgin bride and the only wife in whose presence divine revelation came.
Aisha isn't the only wife challenging notions of "traditional" Muslim womanhood. Khadija, Muhammad's first wife, was a wealthy caravan business owner, a twice-widowed single mother fifteen years his senior, and his employer who directly proposed marriage to him. While Khadija impresses, Aisha's personality shimmers across centuries through 2,210 preserved hadiths. Her bell-clear, courageous voice pronounces on matters from prayer to trade to sex.
At Imperial College, the Sheikh delivered a lecture on Aisha to a packed, gender-segregated audience. He emphasized how Aisha enjoyed freedoms many 21st-century Muslim women lack-debating with men, attending mosque, and joining battles. Muhammad prioritized her happiness, even racing with her (which she sometimes won). The Sheikh lamented how modern Muslims neglect this example: "People, when they marry, they don't want to make their wives happy. Make them happy!"
Capítulo 8
Navigating Gender and Modernity in Islamic Thought
The chapter opens with an anecdote about Sumaiya Akram, the Sheikh's daughter, who at sixteen decided to wear a niqab (face veil). When she first appeared wearing it, her father was so shocked he refused to start the car for her school ride, believing she might have fallen under the influence of a hardline group. The Sheikh worried she was merely copying someone rather than making her own choice. Sumaiya, however, maintains it was entirely her decision, partly motivated by teenage awareness of attraction and a desire for the hijab to serve as "a constant reminder" to control temptations.
The debate around Muslim veiling stems from ambiguous Quranic verses. The most frequently cited passage in Surah "Light" instructs believing women to "lower their eyes and guard their privates, and not to show their ornaments except the obvious ones, and to draw their coverings over their breasts." This vague wording has been used by both proponents and opponents of veiling. The Sheikh, like many classical jurists, believes this allows women to show their faces and hands, while acknowledging other interpretations exist.
The Sheikh firmly believes that modesty, like piety itself, must come from within rather than being imposed. "Laws don't make people pious," he observes. "They protect piety when it is already there." He argues that governments forcing women to cover, as in Iran and Saudi Arabia, doesn't automatically confer modesty. Without genuine fear of God and submission to Him, outward displays of Islamic identity are merely showing off rather than expressions of faith.
Power explores how veiling has been politicized throughout history, representing "boundary problems" as described by Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi. Western imperial powers have used unveiling Muslim women as rhetoric for "liberating" them, from French Algeria in the 1840s to post-9/11 Afghanistan. Similarly, Middle Eastern dictators like Reza Shah of Iran used forced unveiling as a cheap way to signal "progress" and Westernization.
While Muslim men's beards rarely draw human rights concerns, the veil provokes obsessive attention from Western commentators. Power notes that veiling disrupts secular notions of public and private-making the head an erotic site while displaying one's religion openly. As her Pakistani colleague Iftikhar once observed: "You Westerners make love in public and pray in private. We Muslims do exactly the reverse."
Islam approaches sex with frank acceptance within marriage. The Quran's metaphor of women as "tilth" suggests preparation and care, not just access. Unlike Christianity's link between sex and sin, Islam sees marital intimacy as "a glimpse of transcendence." Both partners have sexual rights, and marriages can be dissolved if either cannot satisfy the other. Sheikh Akram views lust pragmatically-an urge from Allah for procreation that requires regulation.
At a females-only seminar titled "What Every Muslim Woman Should Know," the Sheikh discussed topics from menstruation to wet dreams with clinical frankness. Young women asked numerous questions about makeup and beauty routines, which the Sheikh patiently addressed, noting "Islam makes life cheaper!" The session ended with a charity appeal for families of men detained under anti-terrorism laws, leaving Power to reflect on how Islamic discourse interweaves bodily functions, equality, trivial concerns and profound ideas in ways that challenge Western categorization.
Capítulo 9
Interpreting Sacred Texts in Modern Times
When a Muslim friend asked Power to question the Sheikh about why Muslim men treat women badly, he replied that it was because men weren't reading the Quran properly: "If they don't fear God, then they oppress their women." Their discussion centered on the controversial verse 4:34 from "The Women," which many scholars interpret as establishing men's authority over women-even allowing physical discipline.
Various translations offer different interpretations, from men being "in charge of women" to being their "supporters" or "protectors." The Sheikh emphasized that this verse, often misused to justify oppression, actually appears in a chapter defending women's rights within its historical context. In seventh-century Arabia, where female infanticide was practiced and women had no property rights, the Quran's provisions were revolutionary, granting women inheritance rights and establishing their spiritual equality with men as beings "created from one soul."
When asked about feminism, Sheikh Akram responded without hesitation that one cannot blame Muslim women attracted to feminism given their conditions in many Muslim societies. "People want justice," he said. "Feminism wants justice for women. Where Muslims aren't doing justice for the women, these movements will come." He noted that changing attitudes takes time, reminding Power that even in Europe, women's voting rights are relatively recent in some places.
The Sheikh explained how Islam revolutionized women's inheritance rights in the seventh century, when most cultures denied women property ownership. He described his own family's transformation when, at nineteen, he realized his grandfather had unwittingly cheated his aunts out of their rightful inheritance by following village customs rather than Islamic law. "Injustice has its own order," the Sheikh observed. "After one or two generations, it can seem like injustice is the normal way of doing things."
The Sheikh interprets the controversial verse 4:34 narrowly, seeing male "guardianship" (qiwamah) as simply financial responsibility rather than broad authority over women. "It's not that Islam does not want to give women authority," he insisted. "It's just in the house that the man is guardian." When Power pressed him about this power imbalance, he surprisingly claimed men's guardianship was burdensome: "Administration is slavery. The Quran wants to free women from administration."
Power challenged the Sheikh on guardianship systems, asking whether they could adapt to modern realities where women work and shoulder economic responsibilities. When she questioned why men should automatically be guardians, especially when women might earn more or be better educated, Akram insisted the issue wasn't who was in charge but whether people feared God and acted justly. For him, the problem wasn't the qiwamah system itself but human flaws.
They tackled the Quran's most contentious passage on marital rights-the verse some interpret as allowing husbands to hit rebellious wives. The Sheikh was direct: daraba means "to beat," not "to advise" or "to go away from" as some apologists claim. However, he outlined strict conditions: a husband must first try reconciliation and family mediation before considering physical discipline. Even then, three conditions apply: one cannot hit in anger, it must benefit the person being disciplined (not the hitter), and it must be merely symbolic with no pain or injury caused. Some jurists recommended using only a miswak (tooth-cleaning twig). The Sheikh emphasized that "the Prophet never hit his wives" and strongly reprimanded those who did.
Capítulo 10
Between Worlds: Faith, Politics, and Personal Growth
One Sunday morning, Power attended her first sermon about Jesus Christ-not in a church, but in a Cambridge mosque where Sheikh Akram preached to a standing-room-only crowd. The mosque's simple white interior resembled a New England Congregational church, and the Sheikh's message echoed what millions of Christians might hear: people had forgotten their religion's true meaning, focusing on belonging rather than believing, on displaying piety rather than submitting to it.
Akram explained that seventh-century Meccans likely knew biblical stories better than many today, as Mecca was a multifaith city. Muhammad's message continued the monotheistic tradition of Abraham-there is just one God. The Quran distinguishes between polytheistic Arabs and "People of the Book" (Jews and Christians), whom Muslims respect for their scriptures despite belonging to different communities.
When Power asked Sheikh Akram about salvation for observant Jews and Christians who submit to God but don't acknowledge Muhammad, his answer was unequivocal: they must accept Muhammad's message. The Quran reveres earlier prophets, but clinging blindly to ancestral faith without acknowledging God's new signs is considered arrogant. Power found comfort in verses that seemed to endorse diversity and good deeds as paths to God, but the Sheikh maintained that when a new Messenger comes, people must believe in his message.
The Sheikh emphasized the distinction between "Islam" with a capital I (the religion) and "islam" with a lowercase i (submission to God). He urged his students to focus on piety rather than identity politics, and to respond to criticism with prayer and "beautiful preaching" rather than protest. "Islam is not a property," he would say. "It's not your identity... Think about good character!"
When a young woman named Mona asked the Sheikh about struggling against unjust rulers, he advised that even when worship spaces are restricted, believers must continue practicing their faith however possible. This advice had profound relevance for Mona, whose hometown of Cairo was experiencing violent upheaval. Egypt's army had toppled the democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi, and Mona's beloved brother Khaled, who had been Morsi's secretary of foreign affairs, was imprisoned along with other advisers.
When Power asked the Sheikh about justice being Islam's cornerstone virtue, he surprised her with his response. Justice would come, he said, but not necessarily in this life-Allah would provide it in the Hereafter. He suggested that in political contexts, an overemphasis on justice could harm vulnerable communities. "Think of Palestine," he offered. "We have no doubt that there has been wrongdoing against the Palestinians by the Jews. But the way to help is not to bring justice." Instead, he advocated compromise to achieve peace, giving battered communities time to heal and rebuild.
Capítulo 11
The Final Lesson: Death, Doubt, and Return
In Cambridge, Power attended the Sheikh's "Magnificent Journey" seminars covering the Quran's final sections, where he delivered stark messages about death and the afterlife. The Sheikh emphasized that earthly life is merely preparation for the next world: "Your life is governed by death. The next world is our destination. This one is for travel." He vividly described paradise as a garden with rivers, shade trees, and believers dressed in silk sipping drinks from goblets. But he's equally explicit about hell, insisting its fires are literal, not metaphorical.
Power's father died when she was twenty-six, beaten by men in Mexico who mistook him for someone else. The morning after learning of his death, she went to the office and found the Sheikh working alone. When she told him, he pressed his hand to his heart and recited an Urdu elegy the Pakistani poet Iqbal had written after his mother's death. His gesture captured the gray disorientation of parental grief. The Sheikh's recitation comforted her most among all condolences-not despite its foreign qualities but because of them, reminding her that death was universal.
After a year of lessons, Power finally asked the Sheikh what he thought would happen to her-someone who believed in God but wasn't ready to submit to Islam. Gently but clearly, he explained: "In the way of the Quran, people have no salvation until they believe there is no one to worship except Allah." Good deeds without faith might bring worldly rewards but not salvation. Yet he admitted his own uncertainty-not about God, but about himself: "There is no guarantee that you will die a believer... Everything depends on God. Nothing is certain."
The Sheikh criticized Western culture for denying death's reality: "Everyone knows death is coming. So why don't people mention it?" He argued that the West compartmentalizes life, showcasing only youth and beauty while hiding away the old, sick, and poor. "You see youth shining, but you never include death." Power shared how after her father died, she'd gone to Pakistan partly because she wanted to mourn where death was viewed as part of life, not a failure of medical science.
A week after her final lesson with the Sheikh, Power's mother died. The twenty years since her father's death had worn her down, despite her attempts to forge a plausible life teaching feminist studies and traveling. Though she had worn her Judaism lightly in life, Power found comfort in Jewish rituals after her death. Shortly after her mother's memorial service, she learned that the Sheikh's own mother had died unexpectedly.
When news of his mother's death reached the Sheikh, he responded with the traditional Muslim phrase: "Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon" ("We belong to God, and to God we return"). This Quranic verse encapsulates the circular journey of existence that gives meaning to the Sheikh's life. For him, existence is a circle with God at its beginning, end, and every point between. This awareness permeates his daily life through the ritual of prayer-thirty-five times weekly he returns to God through standing, kneeling, and prostration, which on good days feels like returning to "the arms of your mother, when you are a child."
Through her year of study, Power came to understand the Quran not merely as a book to be read from beginning to end, but as a place to which the faithful return repeatedly. While she still doesn't understand it as a unified whole, she's accumulated multiple translations that reveal not its untranslatability but its richness. The Sheikh had challenged her understanding from their first lesson when he asked, "Ah, but is it a book?" The Quran transcends being merely pages between covers-it permeates Muslim societies through loudspeakers, radios, and as physical objects worn or displayed.
While migrants, especially Muslims, are often portrayed as having lives broken in two by moving to the West, migration can double a self rather than halve it. As Salman Rushdie noted about "translated men," something can be gained in translation, not just lost. The Sheikh's migration from India to England has meant a layering of cultures rather than a break. His Western life provided perspective to distinguish between Islamic faith and ancestral traditions, while also giving him resources to return to Jamdahan and establish a girls' madrasa.
Throughout their year together, Power's fundamentalist assumptions repeatedly collapsed. The Sheikh didn't oppose science to faith but saw it as another way to understand God's creations. The devout weren't spared doubt-Akram worried often about being faithful in the wrong way. Her neat opposition between post-Enlightenment worldview and Muslim one crumbled as she recognized how many Enlightenment values the Sheikh shared, with secularism being the main exception.
