Timothy Winter: Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad of Cambridge
Timothy Winter
19 years old, from United Kingdom
Previous Religion: Christianity
My Life Before Islam
Timothy Winter was born on 15 May 1960 in London and grew up in Highgate, the son of the celebrated architect John Winter and a painter mother. He was educated at Westminster School, one of the most distinguished schools in England, and raised in an Anglican family of preachers and ministers. A serious and bookish adolescent, he spent his evenings reading philosophy and pondering the deepest questions of existence, finding neither the fashionable materialism of his age nor his inherited religion fully satisfying. He later described himself as a young man in search of something "higher or deeper" than anything the secular West could offer.
The Moment of Guidance
During the late 1970s, while studying Arabic at Cambridge University, Winter encountered Islam through his course and through the spiritual ferment of the age. He was drawn to what he called "the most powerful idea that has ever been," a pure and uncompromising monotheism. One summer as a teenager a glimpse of striking natural beauty had convinced him that the world could not be explained as the mere effect of material forces. He explored Judaism, which he found morally and intellectually rich, but it was Islam that answered the questions Christianity and skepticism had left unresolved, offering him not a sense of exile but, as he put it, a feeling of coming home.
Reflections
In 1979, at the age of nineteen, Timothy Winter embraced Islam and took the name Abdal Hakim Murad. After graduating from Cambridge with a double first in Arabic in 1983, he studied at the University of al-Azhar in Cairo, the oldest seat of Islamic learning in the world, and pursued private study with scholars in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, later mastering Turkish and Persian. He immersed himself in the classical Islamic sciences, and especially in Sufism, and returned to England determined to help build a British Islam that was rooted in tradition yet fully at home in the modern West.
Winter is now recognized as one of the most influential Muslim scholars in the world. He founded the Cambridge Muslim College and serves as the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer of Islamic Studies at the University of Cambridge, training a new generation of imams and scholars. Through his writings, translations, and lectures he has worked to revive the richness of the Islamic intellectual tradition and to explain Islam to the West with warmth, wit, and rigor. He has been named among the world's five hundred most influential Muslims, and his serene and learned voice remains one of the most trusted guides for European Muslims and non-Muslims alike.