Carla Power on Telling Authentic Muslim Stories
By Yahia Lababidi
Jan/Feb 26
After a childhood spent split between the American Midwest, the Middle East, and Asia, journalist Carla Power grew up interested in the relationship between Muslim societies and the West. She studied Islam and Muslims through her work. It wasn’t until she sat down with her old friend Sheikh Muhammad Akram Nadwi, Dean of Cambridge Islamic College, and principal of Al-Salam Institute, for a year’s study of the Quran that she found herself engaging with the surprising ways they converged and diverged. Her friendship and studies with him inspired her book, If The Oceans Were Ink (Henry Holt, 2015), which was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and for the National Book Award.
Power – the daughter of a Jewish feminist and a Quaker law professor – holds a graduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford as well as degrees from Yale and Columbia. She started her journalism career at Newsweek, first as a writer and later as a London-based foreign correspondent. Her work has been recognized with an Overseas Press Club award, a Women in Media Award, and the National Women’s Political Caucus’s EMMA Award.
Power was interviewed by Islamic Horizons.
Yahia Lababidi: Your books dwell in spaces that are often overlooked: madrasa libraries, kitchen tables, immigration centers. What draws you to these places of encounter and how do they shape your way of seeing?
Carla Power: I feel most comfortable in liminal spaces. I remember when I was a magazine reporter at Newsweek and I’d be put on a story where there were packs of journalists pursuing it – a political summit, say, or a news story like the war in Kosovo. Often, there was pressure from our editors to pursue people in power, to attend press conferences and tap sources in high places. All I wanted to do was run the other way, to talk quietly to ordinary people, not about the events themselves, but what happens slowly, over time, in the quiet, when the press pack has moved on to the next headline.
Y.L.: There is a quality to your listening that feels at once intimate and spacious. How do you protect the sacredness of a conversation while writing it into public record?
C.P.: The sacred quality of connection through conversation can’t be captured on the page – or rather, I haven’t managed to capture it! The moment of connection, of recognition of understanding is a purely visceral experience. I shudder when I think of the ways I’ve tried to describe it: “It slowly dawned on me that. . .” and other yawn-inducing constructions. . .but it’s such a joy to have two tasks in the work of listening required by non-fiction reportage: the listening and connection with the person, and then trying hard to recreate that moment of connection with the reader. It’s impossible, but it’s nice work if you can get it [and] do your darnedest to render it.
Y.L.: Raised among several traditions and across multiple homelands, your early life seems to have prepared you for this form of attentive witnessing. What habits of heart or mind have proven most enduring in that work?
C.P.: A nomadic childhood made a mulch to grow a certain, confident outsiderdom, a willingness to enter a situation, relaxed about the fact that one knows little or nothing about it. Certainty and complete control make me nervous, which is why I’ve never wanted to be a pundit. Moving around a good deal as a kid has made me feel very comfortable being new and naive to places, outlooks, and people which I think has made me open. I’m quite happy knowing very little about a situation, and not feeling foolish for asking questions. Nomadism gives you a sense that everyone has their reasons, undermining tendencies to judge or condemn outright. It’s great training for a writer.
Y.L.: In If the Oceans Were Ink, you write of Nadwi’s teaching as a transmission of trust, shaped by long devotion. How did his relationship to sacred text change your understanding of scholarship and moral inquiry?
C.P.: I grew up with academic parents, steeped in Western notions of what scholarship meant. My father taught law, and my mother taught literature so I had seen questions of morality enlighten and enliven the questions they asked their students. But there was still a distance there, even when they talked about Shakespeare or the U.S. Constitution. To witness Sheikh Akram approach the readings of the Quran or fiqh not as intellectual exercises but spiritual guidance on how individuals and societies can function took the idea of moral inquiry to a whole new level, broadening and deepening the relationship with texts as guides. I’d been taught to take eclectic sources of texts as guides [on] how to live and think. Meeting the Sheikh was my first immersion with someone who saw a particular text as central, even as he was open to other influences, too. But he returned, over and over again, to the texts that grounded him.
Y.L.: In [your book] Home, Land, Security, your method shifts from study to aftermath. What inner adjustments were required to sit with stories marked by rupture, suspicion, or grief?
C.P.: I think it was a question of time. Of sitting and listening for hours and taking extra care not to be directive. The people who shared their stories were going over the worst times in their lives at my request. That’s a huge gift, and I wanted to respect it, never assuming that people just wanted to tell their story which, I think, is not always the case much as it’s assumed that it’s better to talk and be heard.
Y.L.: You have written that reverent curiosity guides your reporting. In a time when both reverence and curiosity seem in short supply, what helps you preserve that orientation?
C.P.: I think curiosity is a prerequisite to being human. It’s a hugely powerful natural resource and one of the first to dry up when people get frightened or stressed. So many of the horrible things we are witnessing – the genocide in Gaza, the wars, the authoritarian takeovers of governments, the desecration of the earth – conspire to build fear and paralysis. Nothing kills our curiosity more than fear – whether it’s fear of the other or fear of losing power, money, and status by finding alternative ways to organize our societies. And you can’t have real reverence for anything without genuine curiosity about it first. Asking questions [about] it, holding it up to the light, feeling its heft – that’s the way to value something, rather than blind acceptance. Like many Americans, I’m now learning that our traditional reverence for democracy wasn’t born of curiosity, but of complacency.
Y.L.: Both books are meditations on fidelity. Whether to a teacher, a tradition, or a question, you return to the ethics of staying. What have these years of listening taught you about the responsibilities that come with attention?
C.P.: I’m currently working on a memoir about being an American imperialist, using my life to understand what it means, in a very personal way, to be a citizen of a global superpower. One of the themes I’m exploring is the ease with which powerful nations cannot just occupy but leave. As an individual, I know my American passport has given me enormous privilege to leave places at the drop of a hat. The levers of fidelity and of departure are central to power structures, both political and personal. Obviously, I’m not an advocate of stasis, or not questioning tactics, but clearly moving on. Whether it’s your factory – if you’ve found a cheaper place to set it – or your army – if you’re worried about your soldiers dying on the nightly news — [it] has created a geopolitical disregard for fidelity long before [the Trump] administration took fickleness to new depths.
Y.L.: Your writing honors the obscurities that often accompany spiritual life. How do you navigate the tension between bearing witness and leaving space for what resists explanation?
C.P.: I’m not great [at] writing about spirituality. Indeed, I’m far less interested in that than I am in how it animates people, societies or politics.
Y.L.: In this hurried and polarized world, what convinces you that this slower, more porous way of writing still matters – that it remains worthy of the labor it asks of us?
C.P.: I’m not sure it does, but I do believe that spending time and care trying to capture and understand people who see the world differently from oneself is everyone’s job, and an important one. It is the opposite of proclaiming one’s opinion, or selling a point of view or product which, in the brand-driven online universe, are too often one and the same.
Yahia Lababidi is the author of more than a dozen books, most recently Palestine Wail and On the Contrary: Nietzsche and Wilde.
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