Can the West Live with Islam - Debate - Tim Winter Cambridge University vs Nigel Biggar Oxford University

Tim (Timothy John) Winter (born 1960), aka Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad, is a British Muslim thinker, professor, and translator. Winter has written about the interaction between Islam and secular issues spanning a wide range of disciplines. He has held a number of lectureships and administrative posts in British academia having to do with theology, the intellectual history of Islamic civilization, and international academic cooperation. He is the older brother of football writer Henry Winter.

Abdal Hakim Murad graduated from Cambridge University with a double-first in Arabic in 1983. He then lived in Cairo for three years, studying Islam under traditional teachers at Al-Azhar, one of the oldest universities in the world. He went on to reside for three years in Jeddah, where he administered a commercial translation office and maintained close contact with Habib Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad and other ulama from Hadramaut, Yemen.

In 1989, Shaikh Abdal Hakim returned to England and spent two years at the University of London learning Turkish and Farsi. Since 1992 he has been a doctoral student at Oxford University, specializing in the religious life of the early Ottoman Empire. He is currently Secretary of the Muslim Academic Trust (London) and Director of the Sunna Project at the Centre of Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge University, which issues the first-ever scholarly Arabic editions of the major Hadith collections.

Shaikh Abdal Hakim is the translator of a number of works, including two volumes from Imam al-Ghazali's Ihya Ulum al-Din. He gives durus and halaqas from time to time and taught the works of Imam al-Ghazali at the Winter 1995 Deen Intensive Program in New Haven, CT. He appears frequently on BBC Radio and writes occasionally for a number of publications, including The Independent; Q-News International, Britain's premier Muslim Magazine; and Seasons, the semiacademic journal of Zaytuna Institute.

As of 2007, Winter was a doctoral student at Oxford University. He simultaneously held several professional appointments and administrative offices at universities and in Islamic organizations, including: Shaykh Zayed Lecturer of Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge University; Director of Studies in Theology at Wolfson College, Cambridge; 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 (see external link), which has published some of the foremost scholarly Arabic editions of the major Sunni Hadith collections. In 2008 he served on the Steering Committee of the Cambridge Interfaith Program. He has been a participant in the Scriptural Reasoning project.