Servant of the Loving One – Paul Abdul Wudud Sutherland: Tea Over Books

uh welcome back and i'm not the star of the show this afternoon obviously we're here to be honored to listen to uh sheikh blah dude with his latest uh this is a cambridge insect here episode so uh as alia was saying uh we're going to hand the floor over now to uh dude who will be reading some uh highlights of his latest anthology after which we'll probably have a conversation okay thank you very much salaam alaikum thank you for inviting me do you see the picture of sheikh nazim i passed away in 2014 allah bless his soul and these poems and short prose pieces are inspired by my encounters with him and my experiences in cyprus north cyprus lefka verna the mountains the landscapes very much the people i'm very interested in the people around the sheikh as well and showing how it was kind of he was the center of something like a community even an ecology i don't really know where to begin but you know even watching my shake i noticed how he did little things differently how he started to put his finger up when he was drinking a glass of water just like this the one and so i noticed that and this is a poem my shaken water seated his right hand surrounds a glass one straight finger raised towards allah subhana walata he hands on the water to his followers he didn't in the past point toward heaven when taking a sip but now he does finding new ways to worship to better remember in each act his lord each juma after talk he passes on spring clear fluid he has touched and some take a sip and others down it whole i read this in the car coming down as one of the poems that i can particularly say is is about the shake and me it's called a cure for hay fever and i use the metaphor a cure for hay fever as a words from sheikh nazim for cure eating grapefruit is a cure for hay fever he said and i saw this grapefruit and it became a kind of symbol for me of the relationship between the sheikh and his followers are we going to dive into that fruit or are we always going to stay on the surface are we going to risk opening it and going in or are we going to be satisfied with this ornament no doubt precious but it's a kind of challenge to go just that little bit further you know to spend just that little bit longer with your prayers with your worship with your commitment just going that little bit inward on a on the warped board a cypress grapefruit you clutch with your hands rub its cheeks not yet wanting to taste this blessed gift from the shake its tropical scent deep or thin cupboard your thumb stroking its gold yellow pitted skin you refuse to plunge inside let it stay a rescued ornament moon bright surface cratered a soft scar face you imagine attacks it endured in a world exiles garden quaking with others on the same ropey branches hurricane flailed it kept its outward crust never fell and burst you idle longing to know who's grip brought it down before reaching yours i should say the follower is me did i have the courage to go further or did i think i was holy enough already did i think i knew enough already i once wrote a book called the holy week sequence when i was a christian and i sent it to these nuns and they said we're holy enough we don't need anything more it's interesting isn't it muhammad ali never accepted that he never thought there wasn't a day he couldn't learn more about all his love the mystery of creation this is my wife's favorite poem she couldn't be with us today so i always like reading it it came about in a very secular way i was commissioned by lincolnshire county council to walk through the county and write about whatever i saw and on the seventh day i saw this scarecrow i was a muslim by then back in 2007 and i asked the scarecrow if it could tell me about the beloved there it is there's shape out in the field like this rocking it's cold windy big straw face and i said okay tell me about the beloved the beloved is an interesting term because you can use it in islam you can use it in christianity judaism many forms the beloved i have to admit i did imagine what it said i ask a scarecrow to speak if it can about the beloved it turns the straw ahead and says beyond what pain is understandable no further torture exists not burning bars but the beloved's arms ready to welcome be confused who's beloved who's you can't separate then accept be bewildered a holy state the blessedness that follows grief the beloved is already approaching to hold you between sense and nonsense be empty as my straw legs and head easily on fire give up on reason don't fantasize you can outsmart the eternal one or keep your individual pursuits the beloved will use you like a rag to change the world you now despise what's beyond indiscernible sorrow is love sniff it when you see the blank wall bloom don't try to name it rose or jasmine just say you over and over to the beloved this is one of the first poems i wrote in cyprus just after my wife and i got married 2004 got married by sheikh nazim sheikh nazim said what's your name your abdullah dude i couldn't pronounce abdullah dude so he said let's call you ibrahim i couldn't pronounce ibrahim either so i just gave up after that i can't believe how naive i was in my coat and my and you know like most times when people get married they send out receptions you know invitations months in advance in gold and silver and purple putting to shame the emperor of constantinople even but we didn't know when our wedding night was going to be he would say oh maybe tomorrow night after isha tomorrow night oh okay then it wasn't and then of course i had to become a muslim he didn't say i have to become a muslim but i did of course have to become a muslim so that had to happen then i had to have a name and then gradually yes tonight so on our honeymoon we came to a place called the mosque of the seven companions now during the greek period of time when they ran the island in the north it was just uh an accommodation just a residence the turkish army invaded in 1974 it was restored back to a mosque it celebrates the seven companions who when they passed away the world was a different place a place where christianity in my opinion had lost its way and had made jesus into a creator the seven companions when they came back found that god was recognized as one again and so this mosque or mccomb celebrates the seven companions it's quite a dark small place beside the mediterranean sea and the waves crash against the wall and throw up their spray over the mosque almost and in that space i can't describe it to you how something was happening more than the words on the page you know how rumi always says these are only words at the end of his poems these are only words i hope these words bring you somewhere into that atmosphere of what we felt inside hazrat omar mosque you 25 years a covered muslim and i five days from my shahada submit before the tall green alcove it's unfigured hollow topped with calligraphy you wish you could read the mediterranean's cadences sound through beats of thought breakers could snarl and hurl storm froth on the shelter's roof yet no weather mood can perturb seven green turbine saints inside when from eight centuries of warring empire's ottoman foot soldiers ducked into a cave and chanced on laid out unaged bodies of seven companions they appeared no more than children cuddling for warmth ready to awake the moss far-eyed attendant collects for the abstract border should data we buy then off-duty discreetly steps out and taking a rod casts for what he might discover in rolling turquoise brilliance in darkness i see unknown mountains enveloped with evergreens curl towards seven bare stone summits each wrapped in unwarpable brilliance you standing close by recite arabic yah seeing slow that cosmic prayer molds the shore rocks of our grief and love this is called forgiveness there's little how are we doing for time shake five minutes um the danger is always thinking that because i'm standing up here now reciting this that i am a great person i am not very pleased i struggle with everything that you struggle with and perhaps even more deeply and this is about when i was in a mood how can you be in a mood with your shakes like shake nosing i was in a mood and i came into the durga grumpy because so many people were there before me so i wouldn't be able to get close to the shake what a pathetic character so this very gentle man from india who i vaguely knew said sure you can sit close to me that's fine forgive forgiveness why should a holy man want to see a worm like me i call him him here i can't face calling him me like him full of contention aw that's me abdul dude concluded the newly arrived in the small sufi mosque or durga where milana passed 90 years of age would make his weekly appearance the turbine prayer-hatted brothers were already gathering many had slept there rising for night prayers then phager now they prepared for juma their rolled sleeping bag stashed in various back corners abdo a dude saw an old young friend almost forgotten near the front where milana would sit in his wooden chair floral and upholstered aw softened he asked if he could join him the beautiful face youth from a subcontinent background more british than abdul dude smiled a pleasurable yes when milana arrived about half an hour later more than once the aged sufi master gazed at his weak servant abdul dude at his mao content and touched his heart and mind without forcing a confession the deep eyes and the shake slumped face full of power and humility struck abdul adooed and only then did he accept or believe he'd entered sheikh effendi's realm with little fanfare the night traveler had arrived may allah forgive me forgive them forgive us i'm going to read just one more i love playing with children going places with them and in cyprus i was playing with his brother and sister on the shore playing hide and seek amongst these great eucalyptus trees and suddenly i looked out into the water and i had an imagination that i saw shake nazim there on a boulder with all the water around him he wasn't attached to the land he was out there on his own so i i wrote about that between tidelines a boy and his young sister and i struggled between tidelines on a north cypriot out of season beach pebbles and redone stones and skimmers had been tossed in heaps with each step our shoes dug in more than half a stride we played hide and seek among surf edged eucalyptus with closed eyes i counted while the two siblings saw a good hiding place they crouched behind the boldest trunk with initials carved high and low in its two tender bark neither made it home free in no time i spied them light dulled the foreshore moaned pebbles were muscled up the beach then forced back into the next waves in rush with each blue turquoise turning a white hissing i saw perched on a sea ring boulder my old shake his green turban riffled his spring juba juba buttoned to the chin at the core of his world cuddling love he sat in seclusion i gave distant salams and pictured an ocean in an ocean it might be interesting if we begin this conversation with one of the things that we were uh trying to understand from imam khazali this morning which is the enigma of the miracle of speech we're dealing with the book uh which is called the defect of the tongue in which he says some things about how it is that so much changes for better or for worse just through the exercise of this little sort of squishy muscle that we find in our mouths and yet so much of the mystery of what's usually veiled the thoughts perceptions emotions of the soul can be conveyed to the outside world sometimes quite profoundly by the tongue so that we can listen to a shakespeare play and somehow his message still affects us simply through these words in the air or on a page and he presents that as a kind of divine mystery so i wonder if you would have anything to say as somebody who is actually as it were an expert mouthpiece for the states of the soul uh to what extent does the tongue words letters vowels consonants authentically represent a moment or an experience perhaps a very subtle one to what extent do you trust uh your power of speech in conveying something precious and unique to a reader who you may never meet one of the things i love about the quran is where that begins with just sounds so because i i can imagine that we have the articulation but we have to continually return to the source that's wordless and there's some sort of sincerity involved in that what is criminal is when words are used to hurt and mislead people because the speaker is not going back to that source the speaker has an agenda and i feel as a poet i can't have an agenda i have to keep going back to some place where the words are fermenting they're not yet words and they may never become words some place in me i remember when someone once said to me when i was debating with them discussing with them and they said well i can only think in words and i thought well i don't always think in words something else happens and that's what i i seek and i think when rumi says at the end of a poem these are only words he means ultimately we have to dive into that space where words come from and and that is a great challenge to us that's the silence isn't it that's the the silence that uh we cherish so much when we we land on it that peace that oh i don't need to express this it's just it's just whole in itself it's it's complete it can't be expressed it can only be approached as it were words approximate this this experience and without that experience i assure you without that experience i would never write i know i would never write it wasn't for the moment where words just are not enough so there's a struggle to try to make those words approach it and i think that doesn't happen overnight i think sometimes that takes a lot of work you know going back to something and rewriting and rewriting because it's an editing process as well and that's one of the hardest things for me to come to terms with the mystery is that you you can receive an inspiration get a lovely phrase but still the work's there to make it into something more you know to complete it to make it here a presentable from the private into the public space somehow it has to go through some kind of refining process and to what extent is that refining process still part of the original as you say almost passive and receptive moment of inspiration or is it a different part of the mind and the concept and actually at times in the past i've actually taken out an inspiration because i couldn't understand it i never do that again if i don't understand something afterwards i keep it in i believe in the inspiration if i don't understand it any because i'm on this level of consciousness when i was inspired i was slightly on a different level i was slightly more open to something and now i trust that i won't take it out even if i don't understand it i think it's a wisdom that's there that's beyond my rational mind like there's aspects of the poem um of uh a cure for hay fever that i i don't really understand anymore exactly what that means that um scarface you know there's a film called scarface i seem to be drawing on the idea that this this grapefruit is all scarred you know from encounters and everything else but i don't can't quite get back to that inspiration but then should i cut it out what do you think do you think i should cut it out do i don't if i don't understand it afterwards so when you feel a poem is finished is that because you've reached the point at which you think the editing process is taking on a life of its own rather than simply clarifying the original moment could be could be one poet said poems aren't finished they're just abandoned i kind of believe that because when i go back you can see how oh maybe that wasn't quite right or you stole that off someone that's and then you don't like to discover it's it's really delicate um i sometimes when i'm in doubt i try to go back to the original experience as much as i possibly can that inspired it inspired the poem and see what more i can glean from it or what i can correct from it but you're right you can you can sort of go off too far and i have to check myself at times definitely yeah which presumably means that the editing shouldn't take place too long after the original moment it should mean that but there's poems that i've written that i never got published for 30 years after i wrote them i worked on them often over that period some of these are fairly old as well i i don't know at the original moment can it be invited or is it a purely passive reception no no no you can work towards it and when i was younger i i thought i waited for inspiration and there was a great story about rilke the poetryname marina rilke a german poet 20th century german poet he was the secretary of rodan the sculpture french sculpture you know is that am i pronouncing the name right i guess and one day rodon saw rook moping around he said what's the matter i'm waiting for inspiration he said milk has said i'm waiting for inspiration and and rodney got very angry you don't wait for inspiration so he sent him down to the zoo in paris and he sat there milka watching a panther until he could write about it so i think that's what's happened to me and i was saying this in the car coming down is that gradually it's become a habit it's become part of a routine in a way to just think i'm a writer and i'm going to take the time to be inspired i'm going to take the time to be receptive i'm going to be receptive one writer said to me observe observe observe keep observing all the time but i think you have i i have to make an effort i have to really you see when i was young when i was a child as a toddler my grandfather recited poetry to me i was less than four years of old old and i was playing in his basement where he was a cabinet maker where he was making furniture but he was reciting to me marmian at the bridge the lady of sherlock uh lady of the lake by um sir walter scott you may not know some of these but you probably know the pi pipeler hamlin don't you where all the children are chased away by the by the pied piper who chases away the rats and when they don't pay and he chases away the children you probably know that don't you he legitimized poetry for me he showed me that it was worthwhile and valuable and acceptable to spend time writing poetry and that's very important to me to to just know i have to do that and that's something okay to do you know so that to me is is where the sort of discipline comes into the passiveness i have to make that effort i have to put that time aside i can't just think oh i can do this and do this and poetry will come along no no no it's like language itself you have to be disciplined in order to say anything coherent it's yes part of the process of communication itself and i think that's one of the wonderful things of islam and and the koran and the pen writing you know all this connection between and and how sufi's loved poetry loved poetry and the word and um and for us yes there's the discipline involved yeah i love hearing what children have to say as well but it's interesting with children you can't ask them to write a theory they come up with wonderful statements but they can't create the whole and i think that's that's the job kind of the job of the adult is to take those momentary inspirations those wonderful insights and make them into something more that a person can receive that the public can receive in some way yeah but there's probably a compromise in that as well isn't there but some posts don't compromise very much others compromise i think a lot more one of the things we were grappling with this morning again was the immediacy of the child's perception of the wonder of the world and the extent to which a spiritual life is a kind of rolling back of the years so that we can have a sense of the integrity of the now and be inspired by that and the extent to which modernity by subtracting us from the natural world in particular through technologies and haste actually makes that process of returning to what we used to be harder and i've always noticed in your poetry that nature is an inspiration and we've just heard the scarecrow poem and the miles of lincolnshire um that's absolutely true yeah to what extent do you think we are blunted and stunted by the fact that uh we definitely are we can just see it you know all the time just nature being closed up you know how you get there and you know the paths that used to be open farmers even are trying to plow them in you know we have to fight for the rights away that we that a previous generation had won you know um absolutely i mean it when i was again young for some reason i just had this instinct it came a lot out of rebellion but this instinct to go out into nature and i i must have absolutely drove in my parents to the state of distraction because i would just go out at midnight and i'll come back to four o'clock in the morning i would just walk and walk and walk you know as a teenager i would go through the woods and just keep walking and when i had a job in an intensive care unit as an or in a hospital in intensive care as an orderly sometimes i'd be on the night shift and i'd come at 11 a.m and had been snowing all day and i just couldn't go home i just couldn't go back i just had to walk out into the country in this deep deep snow and connect with a railway deserted railway line and one time i did that and i came back and i fell into a snow drift up to my neck and i watched a rabbit bound across in front of me on my level and i was on his level and leaves beautiful brown like little miniature miniature uh cellos dancing acro i mean these things never leave you yep and they are from nature you know when i lived on fair isle i scared the people i lived with there stopped for life scared so many people in my life because i just stood on these sat on these rocks and watched the ocean bash below me you know but for the grace of god really but you could be killed so many times you know how you you know i really felt shake that i had a tendency to want to push myself to a limit on nature and then struggle to get back struggle to return to the valley you know climb climb and press to that cliff edge and then make the great effort to come back and these were very inspiring moments for me to sort of break through some kind of fear some kind of inhibition about nature and i think some of that is imposed i think some of it's imposed by modernity and by uh city life and by security and all these things i think some of it's important but canadians must have a natural advantage because you have so much nature i remember it's just sad though so many canadians live in cities you know it's like yes but uh england is basically one large city with a few bits of intensive agriculture in between it's just terrible i recall once in canada when i was about 16 stepping out of my aunt's little cottage north of toronto i'll go for a walk then i realized that these trees probably went on to the hudson bay and beyond and there were bears and caribou and it was i felt myself recalibrating as well no i didn't thankfully i didn't realize that but it is a different kind of experience to what we have in england where everything is so municipalized and i think it's probably harder if you're walking through a little park to be inspired by a few tame ducks on the pond it has to be virgin nature doesn't it that seems to help or doesn't it matter so much is nature just i think as i got older it doesn't matter so much but but i take your point you know but still you know one of my most extreme experiences was um being in the fells and i was let off by these friends and i only had five miles to walk to the cottage where i was staying and i decided to go above the fellas and walk down you know so it would take about 20 miles across the um what was then west west middle uh westmoreland westmoreland westminster and these stars you know these limestone scars and these flats and everything well i was caught in a snowstorm and it was night and i i you know to some extent the nature is there it's just whether you how you approach it you know like you go to the east coast in those rocky cliffs um northumbria in that area around linus farm you know you can really push yourself into some you know areas where you know that tide you don't have to go out there now because the tide's coming oh i think i'll just wait and see what happens you know that kind of instinct to wait and see what happens so what is it in virgin nature then is it a sense of our own fragility and mortality or is it just the fact of god's creation being there unmediated and unsullied by human uh interference it's a bit of both isn't it you know because as you as you on the sufi path i can use those terms as you in some sense grow you become smaller and smaller and hopefully you eventually disappear and you die before you die you disappear and it's only the immensity and god's creation you you don't you don't need to be an eye you don't need to be an ego you're completely satisfied with the whole of existence there it feeds you automatically and i think that's what we we feel i mean english poets like uh lord byron talked about the sublime in terms of this feeling of um and burke and also um can't as well sublime being this feeling that you are small in this universe but they they tended to see that in a kind of terrifying way but i watched a film called the incredibly shrinking man did you anyone ever see this film this 1950s american film the man takes the wrong kind of drug and he starts to get smaller and smaller and his wife and family desert him as he gets smaller and smaller he finally has to fight a spider and he comes out in the grass at the end and he's totally at peace in the forest of the grass he's accepted it he's accepted his minusculeness um when i worked as an orderly intensive care unit i i saw people die and i i saw some people being willing to accept that they're part of this universe but they don't necessarily have to be a physical presence in the universe does that yeah so does the sufi sheikh play a similar galvanic role as virgin nature or is it a different trigger well you know they do talk about a second childhood don't they and i think there is an innocence from wisdom i don't see the two in complete opposition by any stretch of the imagination the sufi sheikh will allow a lot of things to happen and then he will challenge you he's you use the term virginal he's pure as far as the human being can be um though the greatest human being is muhammad ali islam and he once said to aisha i don't have an ego you have an ego so i know i have an ego i know i have something inside me that opposes this journey so there's some negotiation that has to take place there there has to be something and the sufi shake to me helps me because in a way when you go to a lecture no matter how good the lecture is when you leave the room the lecture is not going to go with you but with a sufi sheikh he is going to go with you when he makes a commitment to help you it's for ever you understand he comes with you he leaves with you he has gained that power recently i was in india in a very funny apartment block and you could call it innocence shake you could call it innocence i don't know what the word really is it's spiritual power presence and i was they were lauding me and thinking i was you know great i was in this very strange apartment he went one set of escalators or sorry uh lift and then you went across to a floor and then you went up another lift to the next in this little place this father said put your hand on my son and suddenly i thought not my hand my shakes hand and there it was there was sheikh nazim's hand not my hand now i can't do that another sheikh i met looked at me and he took his face off i can't do that can any of you take your face off have you had a try recently he took his face off in front of me it's there's a there's a power there where that power comes from when i was a christian i met many good people but i met my sheikh before i met him physically i met him before i met him you understand and i was a power and a holiness i could not dismiss i could not ignore it and that to me maybe it comes out of closeness to the creation to all of the planet well italia through practice you know through uh meditation through contemplation through how what through struggle and without knowing it without really expecting it suddenly there just is an opening and you're a different person it's like alice in wonderland i don't know who i am today i've changed quite a few times and really not knowing who you are is a good thing because it means you're still open to this process does that make any sense jake i don't know sort of joining up those thoughts could we perhaps say that the function of nature is to remind us that we are only at home with nature when we have a relationship to transcendence whereas the presence of the sheikh is there to show us what we need to be in order to be like that yes that's fine yes so they're kind of complimentary they're not just well he always do the same job know nature be with nature get into nature go out into nature and there's no doubt that that um is quite healing and inspiring but there are people in the world who can't get into nature they're they're disabled they can't leave their room they can't leave their bed after 2004 did your view of nature and how it inspired your writing change well islam has changed my writing definitely i feel it's more humane contrary to all the uh jihadists and people going around shooting and everything i feel the humanity of muhammad islam and the fact that he's a human being had profound influence on me but again it's not something i can easily map you know i can just see that looking in hindsight i can see the alterations but i can't really map how that happened to us so it's more than just giving you a vocabulary with which to express feelings that you'd more dimly intuited before it's a deeper change than that it's deeper than that yes it's deeper it's um is there something i think the most important thing was that it gave me a confidence that i shouldn't write these things that i shouldn't be frightened i shouldn't be thinking i'm not worthy or i shouldn't be thinking uh it's all been said before better i think with meeting the shake i got a feeling that really i should do what i can do i shouldn't hold back and is there on the basis of that not holding back a kind of poetic mountain that you feel you should climb that you're not ready for yet is there a topic or a theme or a half grasped poem that you're waiting to for the right time to to tackle uh yes um and that's a risky business waiting for the rest right time you're 74. i think i'll write that one in heaven well yes i think so but i i can't really put it down to something i think i can't write about what i know is that always a new experience can come along and shake me shatter me and that i have to deal with it and that's where inspiration often comes from you know ever since i lost my granddaughter in 2012 came estranged from her that has become a powerful source of trying to understand that trying to so i know allah subhanahu wa tala can just throw something in front of me any second any time and i will have to respond to it and that i find yes challenging i don't know what yet i can write i think alia is starting to furrow her brows at me um it's been a really good conversation really grateful to advert and his team for coming down today and the new book and a few selected highlights from previous books are on sale cambridge muslim college training the next generation of muslim thinkers

Channel: Cambridge Muslim College

Views: 30,415

Rating: 4.8931751 out of 5

Keywords: ghazali, tob1

Id: kPxDzLkMkjM

Length: 50min 52sec (3052 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021