The Ashton Central Mosque had the privilege to welcome Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad – Dr Timothy Winter to discuss the blessed month of Ramadan, and how to prepare for it physically, mentally and spiritually. Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad is the Aziz Foundation Professor in Islamic Studies at the faculuty of Divinity and the University of Cambridge and Dean of Cambridge Muslim College.
Cambridge Muslim College was the original vision of Abdal Hakim Murad, who continues to oversee and contribute to its work. Abdal Hakim was educated at Cambridge, Al-Azhar and London universities. He is currently the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer of Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University and Director of Studies in Theology at Wolfson College. He has published and contributed to numerous academic works on Islam, including as Director of the Sunna Project, and is a leading figure in inter-faith activity, notably as one of the signatories to the Common Word statement. He is well-known as a contributor to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’.
Alongside the Shaykh we also had the opportunity to hear from Dr Sohail Hanif and Dr Atif Imtiaz to understand and examine the intellectual, logical and spiritual dimensions of Fiqh and theology in the life of Muslims and specifically in relation to the month of Ramadan.
Dr Sohail Hanif works on Islamic legal theory, with a focus on the Ḥanafī school of law. He received a MA and DPhil from the University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis, A Theory of Early Classical Ḥanafism: Legal Epistemology in the Hidāyah of Burhān al-Dīn ‘Alī ibn Abī Bakr al-Marghīnānī (d. 593/1197), studies the interplay of rationality and tradition in a major work of legal commentary. Sohail has also spent over a decade in Jordan where he studied a full curriculum of Islamic sciences with traditional ‘ulamā’. He was previously Head of Arabic Sciences at Qasid Arabic institute in Amman, an instructor in Islamic studies at Qibla online academy, and has taught undergraduate classes on Modern Islam and Qur’anic studies at the University of Oxford. He has also served as Head of Research and Development at the National Zakat Foundation.
