Timothy Winter

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Abdal-Hakim Murad at Cambridge

Timothy Winter (also known as Abdal-Hakim Murad) is a lecturer in Islamic studies in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and a leading British Islamic scholar. Originally from a Norfolk non-conformist background^[1], he is a convert to Islam. He is also the older brother of journalist and football correspondent Henry Winter.

He was born in 1960, educated at Westminster School and graduated with a first-class honours MA in Arabic from Cambridge in 1983. He went on to study at the al-Azhar University in Egypt where he majored in Islamic studies. In 1989 he returned to Britain and went to the University of London were he studied Turkish and Persian. He obtained a doctorate at Oxford University where he studied the religious life in the Ottoman Empire. He has translated into English some sections of the Ihya Ulum al-Din of Imam Abu Hamid al-Ghazali - "Remembrance of Death and the After Life", "Disciplining the Soul and Breaking of the Two Desires" published by the Islamic Texts Society and has been involved in writing for numerous Muslim publications. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's Thought for For the Day.

His research interests are in Muslim-Christian relations, Islamic ethics, the study of the orthodox Muslim response to extremism, British Muslim Heritage and Ottoman Turkey.

He is General Editor of the Islamic Texts Society's al-Ghazali series. His translations of Al-Ghazali’s On Death and What Comes After and On Disciplining the Soul have been acclaimed.

He is a member of Pembroke College, Cambridge and holds the Sheikh Zayed Lectureship in Islamic Studies. He is also Director of Studies in Theology at Wolfson College, the Trustee and Secretary of The Muslim Academic Trust, Director of The Anglo-Muslim Fellowship for Eastern Europe and President of the UK Friends of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

He attended courses in the traditional Islamic sciences in Cairo and Jeddah, where his teachers included Shaykh Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad and Shaykh Ismail al-Adawi. He has translated several classical Arabic works, including Imam al-Bayhaqi's Seventy-Seven Branches of Faith, and 'Selections from the Fath al-Bari'.