Minna Salami, known in the blogosphere as Ms Afropolitan for her award-winning blog posts on feminism, Africa and culture, reflects on her personal understanding of mysticism.

Minna was brought up in Lagos in Nigeria by a Muslim father and Christian mother, and her multi-religious upbringing meant that she developed an interest in religion and faith early in life.

But it was her experience with automatic writing that made her want to explore mysticism – which usually sees its practitioners experience some kind of union with the divine.

For Minna, mysticism is a search for the “unknown” rather than a direct intuition or experience of God, and for her, automatic writing can be understood as a mystical experience, rather than a feature of spiritualism.

The A-Z of Things Unseen features a different speaker for each letter of the alphabet, all reflecting on their chosen theme from some kind of faith perspective – even though some, like Minna, are highly unorthodox.