Love of Beauty

Abdal Hakim MuradSeptember 1, 202624 min0 comments

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Hadith Death & Afterlife Seerah Aqeedah Spirituality Love of the Prophet Quran Beauty & Aesthetics

About this lecture

In this lecture, the speaker reflects on the profound spiritual significance of beauty in Islam, drawing on the Quranic verse of the Covenant of Souls (*Alastu bi Rabbikum*) to argue that every human being originates from a moment of divine witnessing and that our longing for beauty in this world is a form of nostalgia for that primordial encounter with Allah. Through hadith, Persian and Arabic poetry, and the example of the Prophet's own radiant beauty, the speaker makes a compelling case that love — for Allah, for the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and for the beautiful signs of creation — is not merely a sentiment but the very engine of Islamic spiritual life. Listeners are invited to move beyond outward compliance to a deeper, transformative *mahabba* that makes worship joyful and the path back to Allah clear.

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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