Abdal Hakim Murad – Understanding Islam Series: Sunnah, Shari’ah, Sectarianism & Ijtihad

Abdal Hakim MuradOctober 10, 2011

About this lecture

In his second lecture to non-Muslim middle school and high school teachers, Murad moves on to the more outward manifestations of the Islamic tradition. He explains the sunnah as being the “backbone” of a Muslim’s daily life and provides a brief and simple explanation of it’s vital role in Islam. He then focuses the remainder of his time on the Islamic law, its various sources, and its history. And in closing, the speaker looks at a few case studies of the practice of ijtihad in the Muslim world. (Recorded at the Dar al Islam Teachers’ Institute seminar). Other topics discussed: dua (supplication), Salman Rushdie, medhabs (schools of thought), tabacco and smoking, AIDS, abortion, contraception, and artificial insemination.

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.

All lectures by Abdal Hakim Murad