Living Tassawuf with Cemalnur Sargut
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
One of the people we’ll be interviewing while in Turkey is Cemalnur Sargut. She is one of Turkey’s deepest and most inspiring spiritual teachers, who is leading a resurgence in the study and practice of Sufism, the mystical manifestation of Islam. She’s a magnetic personality who leads the Turkish Women’s Cultural Association in Istanbul, which reaches millions of people “who would like to apply solutions to today’s problems in the Sufi view that knowledge is a state to be practiced and worship is a journey toward love.”
When we’re researching and evaluating a guest for the show, we’ll often listen to recordings of her speaking. We try to gauge not only what kind of talker she might be — the tone, fluidity, and style of her voice — but also her willingness to bring herself into the conversation and tell stories to illustrate what she’s talking about.
Cemalnur Sargut has been a bit more difficult to surmise. Her native tongue is Turkish, so there’s not much audio or video out there of her speaking in English. But, in this audio above, she gives a lecture (which feels more like a dharma talk) to a California audience at the Baraka Institute in October 2009. She speaks passable English before switching back to Turkish with the aid of a translator.
I think there’s enough here to take the risk. It’s the depth of the content that is worth exploring. She shares her experiences about her love for her teacher, her reflections on the nature of the spiritual journey, and her recommendations for how to live a spiritually balanced life. Within the context of Turkey, this should be a dynamic conversation.
Now, how we equip our host with the proper preparation materials for a one-hour interview?
If man’s vocation is to achieve pure joy through suffering, manual workers are better placed than all others to accomplish it in the truest way.
—Simone Weil, French philosopher and activist
Peter Foges described Weil as “preternaturally a worker by brain, not by hand. Small, myopic, physically awkward and weak, it is difficult to think of anyone less suited to toil in a factory, workshop or field.” And yet she championed manual labor as a cure for the social ills of the modern world.
Photo by Flickr/anarchitect/CC BY-NC 2.0
