British Muslim Identity

About the author

Abdal Hakim Murad: Abdal Hakim Murad is the Muslim name of Timothy Winter, a British scholar, translator, and academic born in 1960 CE. He embraced Islam in 1979 and graduated with a double-first in Arabic from Pembroke College, Cambridge, before studying at al-Azhar University in Cairo and pursuing further traditional learning with scholars in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, later adding Turkish and Persian in London. He is Dean of the Cambridge Muslim College, which he helped open in 2009 to train imams and scholars in Britain, and serves as the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge and Director of Studies in Theology at Wolfson College. He was a driving figure behind the Cambridge Central Mosque, one of Europe's first purpose-built ecological mosques. Rooted in the Ashʿari and Maturidi theological tradition and the spirituality of tasawwuf, he is widely read for his translations from al-Ghazali's Ihyaʾ ʿUlum al-Din, among them the book on the remembrance of death and the afterlife, and for works such as Understanding Islam and the Muslims and his essays gathered in Travelling Home. He edited The Cambridge Companion to Classical Islamic Theology and received the King Abdullah I Prize for Islamic Thought. Listed among the most influential Muslims in the world, he is esteemed for joining deep traditional learning to a thoughtful engagement with contemporary Western life.