Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio.

On today's wonderful episode we have my friend Adnan Hussein on to talk about Sufism,

the mystical branch of Islam but we also talk about mysticism more broadly, the left's

relationship to religion and the spiritual paths, the similarities between mystical branches

within religions and the dissimilarities, the problems of trying to secularize or extract

these beautiful mystical traditions from the cultures and religious foundations from

which they arose and so it really is a different and hopefully incredibly engaging information

and conversation about a topic that I've long been interested in, I've touched on a few

times with RevLeft and our meditation episodes are wonderful episodes with Michael Brooks

etc. but I want to continue to drill down in this direction there's an obvious thirst

for this sort of stuff, it's a huge monumental aspect of my life and how I spend my hours

on this earth engaging in deep practices of meditation and very much see myself as on

a spiritual path and have been for over a decade at this point and I see my life being

a continuation of that path and so the connections and the similarities we could draw together

between the sort of Islamic cultural traditions and histories with the Buddhist cultures and

histories and Christian mysticism and even like thinking about Jesus as a mystic or

thinking about Jesus through the lens of St. Francis of Ascissi a famous Christian mystic

I think these things are profoundly interesting and are really doorways into deep transformations

that we can all engage in.

This is not, need not be at least, some hyper obscure, hypoesoteric thing that the average

person can't access.

These traditions are all over the world in every major religion and every major culture

...