Dr Muhammad Afifi al-Akiti BA (Queen's), MA (Oxon), MSt (Oxon), DPhil (Oxon), MSIEPM - also known as Shaykh Afifi^[1][2] - isKFAS Fellow in Islamic Studies at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies,^[3] and Islamic Centre Lecturer in Islamic Studies at theFaculty of Theology, University of Oxford,^[4] and is a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. He is the first ever Malay to be appointed to such a position in this world famous University.^[5]

Dr al-Akiti completed his DPhil in Medieval Arabic Philosophy from Oxford University as a Clarendon Scholar in 2008. His thesis identifies and systematically considers for the first time a group of philosophical writings, called the Madnun corpus, attributed to Islam's greatest theologian, al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111) - his discoveries are based on a painstaking survey of nearly 50 medieval Arabic manuscripts. Besides acquainting scholars with this remarkable new body of source material, his three-volume study presents a critical edition of the most advanced and technical work of this corpus, the manual on metaphysics and natural philosophy called the Major Madnun.^[6][7]

Dr al-Akiti, who comes from Malaysia, is trained as a theologian and philologist in both the Islamic and Western traditions: educated originally at the feet of the ulema of the Muslim world, he subsequently received a First Class degree in Scholastic Philosophy andHistory of Science from the Queen's University Belfast, where he was awarded various scholarships to read for his Masters and Doctoral degrees at Oxford. His areas of expertise are Islamic theology, philosophy and science.^[8]

In 2009, along with Professor Muhammad Abdel Haleem and the IIIT, Dr al-Akiti was shortlisted for the Annual UK Muslim Awards, in one of its 15 coveted Awards for Excellence, the Allama Iqbal Award for Creativity in Islamic Thought.^[9]