Converting to Islam and the Pursuit of Meaning with Dr Timothy Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad)

Dr. Timothy Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad)

There is the objective sacred, which is what human beings since the Upper Paleolithic have experienced as something mysteriously inhering in the beauty of nature, relationships, The human face, just the enigma of being, which probably all human beings, just by virtue of being human, have experienced probably quite frequently in their lives, even if they don't Have the right vocabulary to explore it.

Dr. Timothy Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad)

Surface of the world, there is something that gives sense and meaning and direction to the world, For me, it has always been most easily interpreted in the language of traditional Semitic Monotheism. The sacred principle, the light, the goodness, the beauty, the experienced truth behind things is an enigma that is least bafflingly articulated in the limited net of human language In terms of there being a kind of analogy to a person who, rather than what, is the origin and the end and the purpose of everything. That's the most that my limited Western mind can encompass, I think. I have enormous respect for other traditions which are less personalist, some of the Buddhist traditions, for instance, some of the Indic traditions, Chinese traditions. But I'm very much from the far west of the old world. And I can only see the sacred as being interpreted in terms of there being personal life as the author and the ground of being.

Elizabeth Oldfield

You use this phrase Semitic monotheism. Could you unpack that a little bit for me?

Dr. Timothy Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad)

Well, monotheism as historically expressed through the Hebrew prophets and articulated in terms of the Abrahamic idea of a personal God, a God that in some mysterious allegorical Way weaves stories that enable us to pick up on the fragments of light and meaning that we see in our lives and to see a greater purpose, stories which are often moral. So I suppose by Semitic monotheism I mean Abrahamic religion, the belief in a single personal creator god who creates in time and who resurrects and to whom there will be a final reckoning. So unlike, say, the Dharmic religions of the subcontinent where history is more cyclical than linear and the divine is mediated in more complex ways.

Dr. Timothy Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad)

When everybody would take the pledge. My grandfather would walk up. What was the pledge? The pledge was to lay off the demon drink forever. And you would go after the altar, put your hand on the Bible and swear off drink forevermore. Right. And interestingly, that same structure or the Sunday school attached to it, and I have dim recollections as a rather grumpy child having to go to Sunday school, it's actually become A mosque. So I now tell my family in Norwich, you know, I'm the only one who's keeping up the family tradition. I still go to that place and I still don't drink. I don't know about you guys. And they give me a look. But it's always been important to me to recognize that the monotheisms are closely intertwined and similar and that taking the step into something like Islam is not visiting Mars or Some remote elsewhere. It's a different variation on the same principles of Semitic monotheism. So yes, that sanctuary of my family going back, I suppose, at least 200 years is now a mosque, very busy mosque, lots of converts, very active place. There's an irony.

Elizabeth Oldfield

And do you think your dad was reacting against that world in his kind of Bertram Russell, 1960s modernist world?

Dr. Timothy Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad)

Yeah, I think he was. I think that if you're brought up in the 40s and 50s in an English provincial town, everything must have seemed extremely mediocre and dull and monochrome. This was before multiculturalism, before the sexual revolution, before the Beatles. And if you had any kind of intelligence and have inherited his library, and he was reading very extensively and interested in art and architecture in his early teens, it must have seemed Extremely disappointing and kind of a waste of one's life. The sort of Edwardian preoccupations with virtue signaling within the old English class system, where you went to take your tea, which theatres you went to and didn't go to, where you Sat in chapel. All of that was, I think, extremely oppressive to a lot of people, which accounts for the extraordinary explosion that happened in the 1960s. That was an energetic, chaotic, in many ways, destructive reaction against something that by that time had become almost unbearable to a generation that had wireless and TV and movies And was seeing a wider world. So I think the tea formed part of that. And his reaction was to look to where he thought the life and the vigor and the sincerity was in the Western world, which was in the United States.

Dr. Timothy Winter (Abdal Hakim Murad)

It's complex, of course, because the debate is ongoing about exactly what Jesus made of the Roman occupation, of traditional Jewish apparent collaboration with the Roman occupation. Some think he was actually a zealot, and that was airbrushed out of the texts later on for fear of panicking the Roman authorities. And I'm not really a New Testament expert, I can't comment on that. But clearly, in prophetic religion, there is a willingness to stick one's neck out and to make trouble when confronted by oppression and tyranny. And you see that a lot in the Hebrew prophets. And perhaps Christ, when he overturns the tables of the money changers in the temple, is making that kind of statement. It must have been quite a major operation, I guess.