Demystifying Sufism | Waleed Ziad

Waleed Ziad — author of "Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus" — joins us on the afikra podcast to demystify Sufism. Ziad explains the mystical and scientific aspects of Sufism and its far reaching geographies that surpass today's "securitized" borders and colonial conceptions of South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East as "reified zones". We also learn about the concept of sovereignty in the Islamic world and how modern day understandings of Sufism and abandonment of meditative practices differ from the realities of the pre-20th century Muslim world.