Spiritual Journalism

The premise is simple. A Western journalist, raised in a secular Jewish- Quaker household, spends a year studying the Qur’an with Sheikh Muhammad Akram Nadwi, a classically trained Islamic scholar living and teaching in Oxford.Their meetings are modest in setting, held in libraries lit by slanting afternoon light, or over tea grown cold in quiet cafés, but rich in their unfolding.Texts are read aloud. Silences are allowed their full length. Questions rise slowly and are not rushed toward conclusion.

Sheikh Akram is more than a scholar. He is a vessel of tradition, formed by years of study in the Indian madrasa system and refined by the demands of modern scholarship.When Power first meets him, she encounters a man who can recite Qur’anic commentary from memory while offering incisive views on current global affairs. His bearing is learned yet unassuming.There is no academic bravado, only a steady light drawn from long devotion.

His most monumental achievement, a forty-volume biographical dictionary of female hadith scholars, emerges as a needed corrective to historical forgetfulness. As Power writes, ‘by digging up the buried tradition of women scholars, Akram has prepared the ground for radical social change’. This labour of remembrance reveals a spiritual and intellectual heritage obscured by time and opens a doorway into Islam’s plural past. In its scope and moral purpose, the work refutes the notion that women have stood at the periphery of Islamic knowledge. Power is stunned, and rightly so. Here is a tradition misrepresented by its loudest critics and, at times, misunderstood even by those within it.

That Sheikh Akram’s Al-Muhaddithat contains more than 9,000 entries on women scholars of hadith speaks to the depth and endurance of this forgotten lineage. Some taught in the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina. Others granted ijazat to male scholars whose names would later eclipse theirs. These women were also transmitters of sacred text, participants in a living tradition, traveling great distances to seek knowledge and embody it.Their recovery serves as historical correction as well as an act of spiritual resistance: a reclamation of the right to interpret, teach, and lead.

To study this tradition is to discover how historical amnesia often serves contemporary power.The silencing of these women was not an accident. Rather, it reflects broader tendencies in religious institutions, across faiths, to sanctify structures of authority by pruning their histories. In this light, Sheikh Akram’s scholarship moves beyond mere academic labour. It is a moral act. As Power notes, ‘he’s not writing them back into history. He’s revealing that they were always there.’

The portrait that emerges of these two unlikely companions is endearing. Power brings to the text the questions of her time and temperament. She asks about gender, law, violence, modesty, and marriage. Her inquiries arise from concern and a genuine longing to understand. One such exchange centres on the Qur’anic verse describing wives as obedient. Rather than deflecting, Sheikh Akram guides her through neighbouring verses: those that speak of mutual consultation, spiritual striving, and the delicate balances of marital responsibility. He draws upon classical interpretations while remaining attuned to contemporary sensibilities. He listens, then responds from within the heart of the tradition.

That passage, Surah An-Nisa (4:34), has been a focal point of modern debates on gender in Islam. The verse is often misused, both by critics outside the tradition and by rigid literalists within it. Sheikh Akram offers a method of interpretation that is both rooted and responsive, beginning with the ethical imperative to understand the Qur’an in its holistic context. As Power learns, interpretation in the Islamic tradition is a centuries-long conversation, with voices that challenge, refine, and deepen one another.

Here, the study of Qur’an becomes an exercise in moral imagination. Sheikh Akram demonstrates how the text is not a static code, while honouring its legal and theological gravity. He exemplifies what the tradition calls tafsir bi’l-ma’thur, exegesis grounded in transmission, doing so in a spirit that honours tafsir bi’l-ra’y as well: interpretation shaped by sound judgment and lived conscience. What renders this method persuasive is its integrity.As he tells Power,‘purity of the heart’ is the key to understanding. In this, his method insists that clarity in reading requires clarity of perception in the reader.

The question of women’s roles, too often flattened into symbols, receives fresh consideration. As Power reflects, ‘too often the meaning of the hijab is taken as clear and unequivocal, like an on-off switch, a neat binary code.’ By unsettling these assumptions, the book restores dimension to lived faith, where personal conviction resists cultural shorthand and practice returns to inner intention.

Each session unfolds like a spiritual exercise. There is repetition, variation, and return. The Qur’an, in these moments, lives in recitation and reflection, through the humility of the student and the responsibility of the teacher. Power’s presence is more like that of a guest at a sacred meal: grateful, observant, still learning the manners of the house. She allows herself to remain uncertain.This is one of her subtle strengths. Her awakening arrives as an accumulation of small recognitions. She becomes porous to another way of seeing. Power understands that spiritual growth rarely announces itself. It arrives, rather, like light shifting across a room already occupied.

During one such lesson, Sheikh Akram sketches a line and a circle on the whiteboard. The line, he explains, represents our external conditions, whether we live in a prison or palace, under tyranny or freedom. The circle stands for our cycle of days, the steady passage of time gifted by God. ‘Your circumstances were given to you by Allah,’ he says. ‘Using the cycle of your days to practice taqwa, or love and awe of God, is your job.’ The clarity of this teaching, so simple yet meaningful, echoes long after the page is turned.

This pedagogical style, repetitive, oral, dialogical, is itself a sacred technology. The madrasa model Power encounters prioritises oral transmission, embodied learning, and spiritual accountability. One studies such matters of the heart in hopes, one day, for transformation. The granting of an ijaza, or teaching license, is a spiritual trust, passed from soul to soul across generations. In contrast with the Western academic model, which prizes originality, this form of learning honours transmission as a mode of intimacy. Knowledge is inherited, and its faithful bearing is a form of gratitude.

Power’s secular Jewish-Quaker upbringing gives her a unique vantage. Though she begins as a journalist, her method becomes something closer to lectio divina, that ancient Christian form of spiritual reading.The book records how she is read by the experience. She listens to Sheikh Akram’s words as well as to his silences, hesitations, and refusals. His pauses speak volumes. And in those subtle intervals, she begins to discern that learning in this tradition is inseparable from being.

This ethos of instruction, so central to Sheikh Akram’s method, recalls the classical Islamic principle of ta‘lim wa ta‘allum: teaching and being taught as reciprocal spiritual acts. Power enters this sacred circle as one who learns through listening, the cultivation of receptivity.The madrasa, considered this way, becomes a sanctuary for adab, those forms of courtesy, comportment, and ethical elegance within the Muslim tradition that must accompany the transmission of sacred knowledge. Learning, here, is a refinement of the soul.

One of the book’s deeper offerings is its meditation on sacred text as living tradition. The Qur’an, we come to see, breathes through commentary, legal reasoning, mystical reflection, and communal memory. Meaning is cultivated. Interpretation becomes a form of love, tethered to lineage. Power enters this ecology of meaning with care, aware that her questions, however earnest, must pass through a different register of time. As Sheikh Akram gently reminds her,‘you must be willing to become part of the tradition in order to understand it’.

This is also a work that confronts the responsibility of representation. Power writes across difference, yet she resists the temptation to explain Islam to outsiders or to resolve her inner contradictions. What she respectfully and humbly offers is a form of bearing witness.What moves her is the integrity of a tradition willing to be itself in her company.

In this way, If the OceansWere Ink becomes a meditation on friendship as another form of faithfulness.There is genuine affection between Power and Sheikh Akram, and a polite distance that is honoured. And through that honouring, we glimpse a model for something deeper than tolerance, something like spiritual hospitality.‘Our friendship wasn’t forged through agreement,’ Power writes,‘but through trust, that we were trying to reach toward each other.’ It is this effort, sincere and sustained, that gives the book its lasting radiance.

In an age when religion is often reduced to caricature or wielded as cultural ammunition, this book offers a different possibility: the slow, unglamorous work of learning across perceived fault lines. Power’s encounters allow differences to breathe. Her approach challenges the prevailing rhythms of media discourse, which too often reward outrage in place of understanding. Seen this way, If the OceansWere Ink underscores the need for new forms of journalism, ones rooted in modesty, patience, and deep listening.

Trust is earned. Power does not ignore the asymmetry of their positions; she, as a journalist with a platform, he, as a scholar shaped by a different moral economy. She recognises that understanding takes time and does not rush the process. Her book is a reminder of the importance of choosing to linger in the discomfort of unknowing, to let profound relationships remain incomplete, faithful to the mystery that true encounter preserves.

In their friendship is a model of what the Islamic tradition calls husn al-zann, thinking well of others, approaching differences with generous assumptions. This ethical principle, which Sheikh Akram embodies in his patient responses to Power’s questions, beginning with the assumption that the other person’s questions arise from sincere seeking. This stance transforms potential confrontation into collaborative inquiry. Power learns that to study Islam authentically, one must first cultivate the inner posture that makes learning possible: a willingness to be changed by what one encounters.

During these unfortunate days when our religious traditions are often mined for controversy or reduced to political shorthand, Power’s account restores nuance. She brings to her reporting a form of spiritual journalism, one that withholds premature conclusions, honours ambiguity, and insists on ethical proximity. The stakes are more than academic. In an age of cultural suspicion, her approach offers a blueprint for how one might study without dishonouring, and witness without distortion. It is a reminder that the contemplative mode is a necessity if understanding is to outlast opinion.

The book also illuminates how Power’s background as a journalist shaped by both Jewish and Quaker traditions uniquely prepares her for this encounter.The Quaker emphasis on silent waiting and inner light resonates with the contemplative dimensions of Islamic spirituality, while her Jewish heritage offers familiarity with textual interpretation and the sacred weight of commentary. These convergences are providential, suggesting that interfaith understanding often requires the deepening of one’s own tradition. Paradoxically, Power discovers that her secular upbringing has cultivated in her the very qualities—doubt, wonder, ethical urgency—that make sacred study possible.

Through Power’s careful narration emerges the subtle miracle of transformation that sustained attention enables. Her writing reflects the same virtues she admires in her teacher: steadiness, patience, and an aversion to spectacle. She listens more than she asserts. She waits where others might summarise. In doing so, she reveals that listening can be a sacred act.

In her exemplary book of spiritual journalism, Power has created a space where reverence and inquiry are permitted to coexist. Hers is a book about interfaith dialogue as a record of shared labour: two souls holding space for one another beneath the canopy of a tradition older than either. What renders this book timely and timeless is its emphasis on openness and healing. It illustrates that the most valuable conversations must begin with trust: with one person willing to ask, and another willing to answer with the fullness of their being.