The theologian is considered more significant within Islam than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He tells Tom Peck why he converted It was the sight of peach juice dripping from the chin of a teenage French female nudist that led a Cambridgeshire public schoolboy to convert to Islam. Thirty-five years later, Timothy Winter – or Sheikh Abdul-Hakim Murad, as he is known to his colleagues – has been named one of the world's most influential Muslims. The hitherto unnoticed Mr Winter, who has an office in Cambridge University's Divinity Faculty, where he is the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer of Islamic Studies, has been listed ahead of the presidents of Iran and Egypt, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Mahmoud Abbas. "Strange bedfellows," he concedes. Tall, bookish, fair-skinned and flaxen-haired, a wiry beard is his only obvious stylistic concession to the Islamic faith. To the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre (RISSC), which is based at the Royal Aal al-Bayt Institute for Islamic Thought in the Jordanian capital, Amman, Winter is "one of the most well-respected Western theologians" and "his accomplishments place him amongst the most significant Muslims in the world". Winter is also the secretary of the Muslim Academic Trust, director of The Anglo-Muslim Fellowship for Eastern Europe, and director of the Sunna Project, which has published the most respected versions of the major Sunni Hadith collections, the most important texts in Islam after the Qur'an. He has also written extensively on the origins of suicidal terrorism. According to the RISSC, the list highlights "leaders and change-agents who have shaped social development and global movements". Winter is included because "[his] work impacts all fields of work and particularly, the religious endeavors of the Muslim world". In the 500 Most Influential Muslims 2010, Mr Winter is below the King of Saudi Arabia – who comes in at number one – but ahead of many more chronicled figures. He is ranked in an unspecified position between 51st and 60th, considerably higher than the three other British people who make the list – the Conservative Party chairman Baroness Warsi; the UK's first Muslim life peer, Lord Nazir Ahmed, who was briefly jailed last year for dangerous driving; and Dr Anas Al Shaikh Ali, director of the International Institute of Islamic Thought – making him, at least in the eyes of the RISSC, Britain's most influential Muslim. "I think that's very unlikely," says Winter, seated in front of his crowded bookshelves. "I'm an academic observer who descends occcasionally from my ivory tower and visits the real world. If you stop most people in the street they've never heard of me. In terms of saying anything that makes any kind of sense to the average British Muslim I think they have no need of my ideas at all." The son of an architect and an artist, he attended the elite Westminster School in the 1970s before graduating from Cambridge with a double first in Arabic in 1983. His younger brother is the football correspondent Henry Winter. Tim says: "I was always the clever, successful one. Henry just wanted to play football with his mates. I used to tell him, ‘I'm going to make loads of money, and you'll still be playing football with your mates.' Now he's living in a house with 10 bedrooms and married to a Bond girl." (Brother Henry insists on the telephone later: "She was only in the opening credits. And it's not as many as 10.") If this seems an improbable background for a leading Muslim academic, his Damascene moment on a Corsican beach is unlikelier still. "In my teens I was sent off by my parents to a cottage in Corsica on an exchange with a very vigorous French Jewish family with four daughters," Winter recalls. "They turned out to be enthusiastic nudists. "I remember being on the beach and seeing conjured up before my adolescent eyes every 15-year-old boy's most fervent fantasy. There was a moment when I saw peach juice running off the chin of one of these bathing beauties and I had a moment of realisation: the world is not just the consequence of material forces. Beauty is not something that can be explained away just as an aspect of brain function." It had quite an effect on him: "That was the first time I became remotely interested in anything beyond the material world. It was an unpromising beginning, you might say. "In a Christian context, sexuality is traditionally seen as a consequence of the Fall, but for Muslims, it is an anticipation of paradise. So I can say, I think, that I was validly converted to Islam by a teenage French Jewish nudist." After graduating, Winter studied at the University of al-Azhar in Egypt and worked in Jeddahat before returned to England in the late eighties to study Turkish and Persian. He says he has no difficulty reconciling the world he grew up in with the one he now inhabits. "Despite all the stereotypes of Islam being the paradigmatic opposite to life in the west, the feeling of conversion is not that one has migrated but that one has come home. "I feel that I more authentically inhabit my old identity now that I operate within Islamic boundaries than I did when I was part of a teenage generation growing up in the 70s who were told there shouldn't be any boundaries." The challenge, he feels, is much harder now for young Muslims trying to integrate with British life. "Your average British Asian Muslim on the streets of Bradford or Small Heath in Birmingham is told he has to integrate more fully with the society around him. The society he tends to see around him is extreme spectacles of binge drinking on Saturday nights, scratchcards, and other forms of addiction apparently rampant, credit card debt crushing lives, collapsing relationships and mushrooming proportions of single lives, a drug epidemic. It doesn't look very nice. "That is why one of the largest issues over the next 50 years is whether these new Muslim communities can be mobilised to deal with those issues. Islam is tailor-made precisely for all those social prolems. It is the ultimate cold turkey. You don't drink at all. You don't sleep around. You don't do scratchcards. Or whether a kind of increasing polarisation, whereby Muslims look at the degenerating society around them and decide ‘You can keep it'." It is not this, though, that contributes to some young Muslim British men's radicalism, he says, since their numbers are often made up of "the more integrated sections". "The principle reason, which Whitehall cannot admit, is that people are incensed by foreign policy. Iraq is a smoking ruin in the Iranian orbit. Those who are from a Muslim background are disgusted by the hypocrisy. It was never about WMD. It was about oil, about Israel and evangelical christianity in the White House. That makes people incandescent with anger. What is required first of all is an act of public contrition. Tony Blair must go down on his knees and admit he has been responsible for almost unimaginable human suffering and despair." He adds: "The West must realise it must stop being the world's police. Why is there no Islamic represenation on the UN Security Council? Why does the so-called Quartet [on the Middle East] not have a Muslim representative? The American GI in his goggles driving his landrover through Kabul pointing his gun at everything that moves, that is the image that enrages people." Is there a similar antagonistic symbolism in the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero? "If the mosque represented an invading power they would have every right. Muslims in America are there as legitimate citizens with their green cards, with jobs, trying to get by. They are there in humble mode. "Would you oppose the construction of Shinto Shrines at Pearl Harbour, of which there a number? How long must the Muslims of lower Manhattan have to wait to get a place to pray five times a day? With Islam there are certain liturgical requirements. It's not like a church that you can build on the top of a hill and say, we've only got to go once a week and it looks nice up there. Muslims need to pray five times a day, they can't get the subway out and back. It should be seen as a symbol of reconciliation not antagonism." Last year Winter helped set up the Cambridge Muslim College, which offers trained imams a one year diploma in Islamic studies and leadership, designed to help trained imams to better implement their knowledge and training in 21st-century Britain. This year's first graduating class have recently returned from a trip to Rome where they had an open audience with the Pope. In an increasingly secular Britain, sociologists suggest with regularity that "football is the new religion". Winter understands the comparison. "Football has everything that is important to religion," he says. "Solidarity, skill, ritual, the outward form of what looks like a sacred congregation. Except it's not about anything." Just don't tell his brother. source : http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/timothy-winter-britains-most-influential-muslim-nd ash-and-it-was-all-down-to-a-peach-2057400.html

I agree with some of the concerns of this Kadra Yusuf about fraud among Somalis. But after doing some research it seems that she is one of those people looking to make a name for herself. I wouldn't say she is a freemason, she aint that level, to me she seems like a minion more than anything else. @neumann the atheist, don't you know that all the cool kids pray five times a day?

more damage is done to the somali community by the result of absent fathers from these activities than there is benefit from whatever funds gained.

In all honesty had we sacrificed and acted trustfully, you would have seen waves of norwegian reverts. but when you represent Islam and you act dishonestly, don't be surprised for people not to be impressed.

This is a tough subject, however, each of us should hold ourselves to a high standard and act honestly. Only then can be examples for those who are tempted by the easy money. a friend of mind decided to give his wife hundreds of dollars ($500+) a month so that she would not resort to this easy money which unfortunately she was brainwashed to pursue. Men are also culprits in this and so is the society.

Whatever happened to the author of this post? He just stopped responding to his thread?

Prometheus, with a nick such as yours, it is only expected that you'd be anti-religion. But, I blame those who are making Islam look like a barbaric religion, when our Prophet PBUH was sent as "a mercy to all worlds."

Originally posted by chocolate & honey: And no, every parent would NOT naturally want their kids to go school and learn. How naive are you? Some would want to pimp their kids, some would want them to work, some would marry them off and some dont even care for education. Thats why there are laws that mandate schools. I have to vehemently disagree with this. The vast majority of parents love their children and given the resources would do the best thing for their future growth. And for the few derelict parents, they should be dealt with specifically. We don't need to design a system for everyone for the sake of the few. Parents should have their full rights and duties with regards to the rearing of their children and education is part of the rearing.

And no, I do not take any stimulants whatsoever, although I've been fasting for a long while so maybe that is making me delusional

thanks malika for humoring me. I think one will get a better feel of the intentions behind compulsory schooling by noting the reaction of the population to it when it was first introduced in late 1800 and early 1900 hundreds. the overwhelming reaction to it was highly negative. Look at the results: ever decreasing levels of literacy starting after WW2. This was not by accident. The tycoons that started it (rockefeller, ford, morgan) intended to create generic individuals for the industrial future they envisioned. Yes, we do live in a command economy, the difference between us and the chinese is that the chinese are more aware of their predicament. Although the measures to achieve that here were more sophisticated and subtle. Their goals were to create dependent consumerist individuals and to prevent as much as possible the rise of creative individuals that might upset the economic balance. You can readily dismiss my claims or you can read and find more about it yourself. Google search the "Seven Lesson Schoolteacher". @C&H thanks for the correction. The idea is that kindergarten is a garden where the seeds are sown into the mind of little kids.

Originally posted by chocolate & honey: Excuse me? How can you say that? Are you a teacher? Have you ever taught a lesson to a child and watch them get the lesson? please dont make sweeping generalizations. Most kids do learn from good teachers and high school is where they lay out foundations. I don't think high school is where the foundations are laid. More likely it is in kindergarden and in elementary. Why do you think it is called kindergarden? Think about it, if school was really beneficial for the kids (i'm not saying all should quit school) then why is it compulsory? Wouldn't parents naturally want there kids to go there to receive the benefits? Another purpose in addition to being a daycare for big kids (i'm talking about public schools and perhaps most private schools.) is that it also serves as a mechanism to prevent young adults from competing with adults in the job market. This creates an illusion of plentiful jobs when that is not really the case.

1. Eat real food 2. Stop before you fill your stomach 3. Drink plenty of water

Salaams all, I've come to realize that teaching in the states is akin to being a baby-sitter. The main purpose of compulsory schooling is to serve as childcare for big kids... If you want to be the best teacher you can be and bring the best out of your students find a day job and teach on the side.