Afifi al-Akiti

Who is Afifi al-Akiti?

Dato' Dr Afifi al-Akiti, BA, MA, MSt, DPhil, MSIEPM – also known as Shaykh Afifi – is KFAS Fellow in Islamic Studies at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and Islamic Centre Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, 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. Elsewhere, he is a Visiting Professor of Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. He has received widespread media recognition across the globe.

Afifi 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 – 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.