4 Quotes & Sayings By Abdal Hakim Murad

Abdal Hakim Murad was born in 1948 in Mosul, Iraq. He belonged to a Kurdish family and was a member of the "Assyrian" community. He completed his studies at the University of Mosul and did post-graduate work at the University of Damascus, where he received a PhD in Islamic Studies. He taught at the Baghdad Institute of Islamic Studies Read more

His book on the life of John Calvin, John Calvin: Prophet of Freedom, was translated into English by Fazlur Rahman Khan and published by Oxford University Press. In it he gives a detailed account of the life and ideas of John Calvin from his earliest years until his death in 1564.

Religion is never more tested than when our emotions are...
1
Religion is never more tested than when our emotions are ablaze. At such a time, the timeless grandeur of the Law and its ethics stand at our mercy. Abdal Hakim Murad
2
Those who come to Islam because they wish to draw closer to God have no problem with a multiform Islam radiating from a single revealed paradigmatic core. But those who come to Islam seeking an identity will find the multiplicity of traditional Muslim cultures intolerable. People with confused identities are attracted to totalitarian solutions. And today, many young Muslims feel so threatened by the diversity of calls on their allegiance, and by the sheer complexity of modernity, that the only form of Islam they can regard as legitimate is a totalitarian, monolithic one. That there should be four schools of Islamic law is to them unbearable. That Muslim cultures should legitimately differ is a species of blasphemy. Abdal Hakim Murad
3
Yet she belongs, finally and truly, only to God. The hijab is a symbol of freedom from the male regard, but also, in our time, of freedom from subjugation by the iron fist of materialism, deterministic science, and the death of meaning. It denotes softness, otherness, inwardness. She is not only caught in a world of power relations, but she inhabits a world of love and sacrifice. This freedom, which is of the conscience, is hers to exercise as she will. Abdal Hakim Murad