A Talk, Reading and Q&A with Carla Power on ‘If the Oceans Were Ink’
24 November 2015
A Talk, Reading and Q&A with Carla Power on ‘If the Oceans Were Ink – An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran
7pm – 9pm, Tuesday
Room 2, Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1RX
In partnership with the Cambridge Islamic College, the Centre of Islamic Studies presents ‘Reading the Quran at Starbucks’. This event will include a talk, reading and Q&A with Carla Power, author of ‘If the Oceans Were Ink – An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran’.
News headlines on Islam ignore its traditions or the people shaping them. In my recent memoir If The Oceans Were Ink, Carla Power attempts to go beyond the headlines, to understand the world-view of a prominent Britain-based Islamic scholar. An account of Powers’ twenty-year friendship with Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi, the founding chancellor of the Cambridge Islamic College, Oceans probes issues of migration, faith, and explores the possibility of tolerance in a world wracked with intolerance. A finalist for this year’s National Book Award in the United States, If The Oceans Were Ink is a lively, accessible work, aimed at the general reader, while sketching out Sheikh Nadwi’s thought and life.
About the author:
A journalist specializing in Muslim societies, global social issues and culture, Carla Power is the author of If the Oceans Were Ink: An Unlikely Friendship and a Journey to the Heart of the Quran (Henry Holt, 2015), an account of her year spent studying with the traditional Islamic scholar Sheikh Mohammad Akram Nadwi. She writes for Time and is a former correspondent for Newsweek, where she produced award-winning stories, reporting from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Her essays have appeared in a wide range of publications, from Vogue and O: The Oprah Magazine to The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and Foreign Policy.
Power holds an M.Phil. from St. Antony’s College, Oxford University in Modern Middle Eastern Studies, as well as degrees from Yale and Columbia. Married, with two children, she lives in England.
