Embodied Education

Sarah Babiker reflects on her undergraduate years 

Sarah Babiker (BA Class of 2023) is Sudanese and grew up in Ireland. Her family spoke Arabic at home — and still she discovered new meanings of familiar words in her Arabic class at Zaytuna College. She knew, for example, that sufra meant dinner table — but not that the word’s roots relate to travel. “We’re meant to live in this world like travelers, so sufra reminds us, when we sit down to eat, that this is not our true home,” Sarah recalls.   

She also learned that the root of the Arabic word for story — al-Qasah — relates to cutting wool. When she mentioned this to her advisor, he pointed out that “text” comes from the Latin word “textos,” which is linked to textiles; and “trope” is linked to turning — like spinning wool, Sarah thought. Her fascination inspired her to choose wool-related metaphors for storytelling as the subject of her thesis, Wool to Power.  

Back in Ireland after graduation, she worked with a filmmaker to write and produce a movie exploring these themes. It was filmed in Hollywood County — known for its wool, and as the namesake of the global storytelling capital in California. Sheep play a role in her film — and so does storytelling, grandparents, and children hooked on digital devices. That film, Hollywool, will soon be submitted to film festivals.  

Now at Trinity College pursuing her PhD in environmental history, Sarah is grateful for the ways Zaytuna prepared her for success in grad school. “Thanks to Zaytuna, I can read and think critically, discern scholarly assumptions, and clearly articulate why I disagree with them,” she said. For instance, her class read an article by an environmental historian who blamed monotheistic religion for the rupture between humans and nature. Quoting the Qur’an, he cited the fact that God gave humans “dominion” over the earth as evidence that Islam was anthropocentric.  

“Before Zaytuna, I might have felt uncertain how to respond,” Sarah says. Instead, she explained to her class what it means to be a vicegerent, or caretaker of the earth. She told them this role centers human responsibility, not superiority, and awakens in believers a kinship with all of life. To become a servant of God, she explained, is to join everything else in creation.  

Reflecting on her undergraduate years, she recalls unity: with her campus community; with nature; with her own mind, body, and soul. At Zaytuna, she says, she learned that the cultivation of virtue is an essential complement to intellectual engagement; without it, academic pursuits are easily taken over by the ego. 

“At Zaytuna I learned at least as much from the embodied character of my teachers — how they taught, how they treated students, the humility and integrity they brought to scholarship — as I did from the amazing texts we studied,” she says. “A Zaytuna education is a way of life. Ideas are not just abstractions; they are also embodied.”