Martin Lings
| Martin Lings (Abū Bakr Sirāj al-Dīn) |
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|---|---|
Martin Lings in 2004
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| Title | Shaykh |
| Born |
24 January 1909 Burnage, Manchester |
| Died | 12 May 2005 (aged 96) Westerham, Kent |
| Era | Modern era |
| Occupation | Islamic scholar, author; Shakespearean scholar |
| Religion | Islam |
| Denomination | Sunni |
| Jurisprudence | Maliki |
| Movement | Sufi, Traditionalist School |
| Notable work(s) | Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources |
| Alma mater | |
| Sufi order | Shadhili (Darqawi-Alawi-Maryamiya) |
Martin Lings (24 January 1909 – 12 May 2005), also known as Abū Bakr Sirāj ad-Dīn, was an English Muslim writer, scholar, and philosopher. A student of the Swiss metaphysician Frithjof Schuon and an authority on the work of William Shakespeare, he is best known as the author of Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, first published in 1983 and still in print.
Lings was born in Burnage, Manchester, in 1909 to a Protestant family. The young Lings gained an introduction to travelling at a young age, spending significant time in the United States because of his father's employment. Lings attended Clifton College and went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a BA in English Language and Literature. At Magdalen, he was a student and then a close friend of C. S. Lewis. After graduating from Oxford Lings went to Vytautas Magnus University, in Lithuania, where he taught Anglo-Saxon and Middle English.
For Lings himself, however, the most important event whilst at Oxford was his discovery of the writings of the René Guénon, a French metaphysician and Muslim convert, and those of Frithjof Schuon, a German spiritual authority, metaphysician and Perennialist. In 1938, Lings went to Basle to make Schuon's acquaintance. This prompted his embracing Islam to embrace the branch of the Alawiyya tariqa led by Schuon. Thereafter, Lings remained Schuon's disciple and expositor for the rest of his life.
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