Carla Power Quotes

But a niqab was different. It was not a "choice" in the manner of the consumer economy. A visual obliteration of the self, a plain black niqab was a refusal to engage in everyday modes of self-expression. The woman who wore it chose to wear it because it connected her to something bigger than the self. It could be God. It could be a Muslim identity. But it wasn't a simple case of a teenage fashion choice, that was certain.

Just as trying to impose sharia law wouldn't make people into good Muslims, imposing the hijab wouldn't automatically confer modesty. Without fear of God and a true submission to Him, these outward displays of Islamic identities were just about showing off an identity, he explained, not about faith. "There could be people who follow sharia law, but they're not believers," he said. "Or they could be someone who doesn't cover, but they are believers," he said.

Covering your head required true commitment before it truly worked. "Clothes don't make your pious," he told his students. "If you're pious, the covering can protect you. But trying to force women into the house, or into the hijab, it's not going to make them pious.

Denying women access to the mosque, like denying them other rights, was simply clinging to customs, not faith, said Akram. In the case of education, he'd gone further: preventing women from pursuing knowledge, he said, was like the pre-Islamic custom of burying girls alive.

For the Sheikh, modest Muslims covering was not to render a woman absent or invisible, just "that they be present and visible, with the power of their bodies switched off.

Anybody who forces people to change their beliefs, they are not a teacher. Learning should come from understanding properly, not from being forced.

Modern Muslims often simply cling to the external signs of their faith: "People are busy worrying about their beards, or their headscarves," he observed. "So the faith becomes like their identity. It happens like this in every culture, every faith. The outer aspects to become more important, while the soul inside is forgotten." He paused, shook his head, and gazed mournfully out a the crowd. "At the end of the day, people are carrying around a dead body, with no soul."

"Why do Muslims have so much suffering, all over the world?" he demanded. "We are carrying the body of Islam! We don't have submission. We have got the law, but without the hikma - the wisdom - behind it. Religion hasn't come to give people an identity! Its purpose is not so you can say, 'We belong to this group.' But at this moment ninety-nine percent of Muslims treat religion as identity! But God does not like identity. He does not want people to be proud of belonging. He wants faith, and he wants action.

So is he a radical?" non-Muslims often asked when I told them about the Sheikh. "Not at all," I'd say, assuming we were all speaking in post-9/11 code. "Of course not."

And I'd meant it. He is not a radical. Or rather, not their kind of radical.

His radicalism is of entirely another caliber. He's an extremist quietist, calling on Muslims to turn away from politics and to leave behind the frameworks of thought popularised by Islamists in recent centuries. Akram's call for an apolitical Islam unpicked the conditioning of a generation of Muslims, raised on the works of Abu l'Ala Maududi and Sayyid Qutb and their nineteenth-century forerunners. These ideologues aimed to make Islam relevant to the sociopolitical struggles facings Muslims coping with modernity. Their works helped inspire revolutions, coups, and constitutions. But while these thinkers equated faith with political action, the Sheikh believed that politics was puny. He was powered by a certainty that we are just passing through this earth and that mundane quests for land or power miss Islam's point. Compared with the men fighting for worldly turf, Akram was far more uncompromising: turn away from quests for nation-states or parliamentary seats and toward God. "Allah doesn't want people to complain to other people," he said. "People must complain to Allah, not to anyone else."

All the time spent fulminating, organising, protesting? It could be saved for prayer. So unjust governments run

Allah doesn't want people to complain to other people," he said. "People must complain to Allah, not to anyone else.

Having lost the presence of your loved one in daily life, you've only had them as ghostly presence to begin with. Visits home and phone calls can bring them to life, but only temporarily. So after the call with the news comes, the long-distance griever has to resummon the love object in her mind, then lose the beloved again. The gears of imagination grind through a painful game of found-and-lost, lost-and-found.

Later, when I asked him whether I'd offended him, he'd assured me I hadn't. It was simply that Muslims didn't hold with images of prophets, he explained. "To depict them limits them," he explained. "Out of respect for the prophets, we don't like to limit them." That upended my pat ideas of art's power. For Akram, pictures stunted the imagination rather than stretched it.