Marriage & Family Life

Friday sermon (jum'ah khutba) by Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad - Cambridge - 6 November 2009 - 24 mins 05 secs

In this sermon, Sheikh Abdal Hakim discusses the significance of marriage as a prophetic sunna, and how family life relates to internalising the seeking of Allah's pleasure and the practice of His religion.

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Islam, Gender, Marriage & Sexuality

Talk by Sheikh Abdal Hakim Murad - Rhodes House, Oxford - 9 February 2009 - 1 hr 00 mins 04 secs

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In another talk for OUISOC's Experience Islam Term, Sheikh Abdal Hakim offers some further thoughts on gender in Islam (which dovetail quite nicely with previous talks posted here and here). He begins, with characteristic catholicity, by discussing the career of Valentine de Sainte Point, an early French feminist and Futurist who in later life rejected what she perceived as the dehumanising trajectory of Western culture and converted to Islam, in which she found a more integrated and integrative understanding of human nature.

From that, the sheikh moves on discuss some aspects of the Islamic understanding of gender and sexuality, and how in this respect, as in others, the message of the Qu'ran and the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) acted as a rectification to misinterpretations of previous revelation; in this case, the rejection and excoriation of human sexuality often manifested by Christianity. The Prophet, by contrast, as 'mankind perfected', embraced this aspect of his humanity as he did every other, according to the Divine Guidance. His role as exemplar was thereby extended to women partly through his marriages, which provided multiple models of exemplary female behaviour. The sheikh finishes by discussing this in relation to the Prophet's wives (may God be pleased with them) and Qur'anic examples of ideal women.

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