#054: Awakening in the Dream: Ibn Arabi, Virtual Reality & Ultimate Reality w/ Oludamini Ogunnaike

Oludamini Ogunnaike holds a PhD in African Studies and the Study of Religion from Harvard University, and is Assistant Professor of African Religious Thought at the University of Virginia. Oludamini Ogunnaike is a scholar of African, Islamic, and Religious Studies, with a focus on the intellectual and artistic dimensions of West African Sufism and Ifa, an indigenous Yoruba religious tradition. His work examines the postcolonial, colonial, and precolonial Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West Africa, seeking to understand the philosophical dimensions of these traditions by approaching them and their proponents not merely as sources of ethnographic or historical data, but rather as distinct intellectual traditions and thinkers, and even as sources of theory and possible inspirations for methods of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Oludamini is also working on an online database of West African Sufi Poetry and, along with Ayodeji Ogunnaike, is working on a similar database for the Odu Ifa (the sacred orature of Ifa). He recently published Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: A Study of West African Arabic Madih Poetry and its Precedents