Abdal Hakim Murad - Bear Witnessing

Abdal Hakim MuradJanuary 25, 20190 comments

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Knowledge & Wisdom Spiritual Purification Aqeedah Quran Tafsir Tawhid Sincerity & Intention Islamic Scholarship

About this lecture

In this lecture delivered at Cambridge Muslim College, Abdal Hakim Murad reflects on the Qur'anic verse in which Allah, the angels, and the people of knowledge all bear witness to divine unity, exploring what it truly means to be a scholar in Islam. He argues that Islamic scholarship is not the accumulation of facts but a living, integrated act of testimony — a *shahada* — to the oneness of Allah, warning against the pitfalls of pride, fragmentation, and corrupt intention that can hollow out even the most learned of people. Drawing on figures such as Imam al-Ghazali, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, and the Qur'anic story of Bal'am ibn Ba'ura, he calls scholars and students alike to root their knowledge in sincerity, comprehensive vision, and the worship that alone gives learning its true light.

Abdal Hakim Murad

Timothy John "Tim" Winter (born 1960), also known as Abdal Hakim Murad, is a British Sufi Muslim researcher, writer and teacher. His profile and work have attracted media coverage both in the Muslim World and the West. Conversant in both traditional Islamic scholarship and Western thought and civilization, Winter has made contributions on many Islamic topics. Education Born in 1960, Winter was educated at Westminster School, and graduated with a double-first in Arabic from Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge in 1983. He then studied and taught traditional Islamic sciences at the Al-Azhar University in Egypt for several years, and spent several more in Jeddah, where he administered a commercial translation office and maintained close contact with Shaykh Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad. In 1989, he returned to England and spent two years at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London where he concentrated on Turkish and Persian. Career Winter is currently the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer of Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University, Director of Studies in Theology at Wolfson College, and a doctoral student at Oxford University, where he is studying the relationship between the government and Sufi brotherhoods in the Ottoman Empire. Winter is also the secretary of the Muslim Academic Trust (London), Director of The Anglo-Muslim Fellowship for Eastern Europe, President of the UK Friends of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Director of the Sunna Project, which has published scholarly Arabic editions of the major Sunni Hadith collections.

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