Here Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad  narrates the history of poetry in Islamic civilization.  Shaykh Abdal Hakim is a British Muslim researcher, writer, columnist and teacher - widely known as one of the world's leading Islamic scholars. His profile and work have attracted significant media coverage both in the Muslim World and the West. Conversant in both traditional Islamic scholarship and Western thought and civilization, Winter has made contributions in the following areas: Muslim-Christian relations, Islamic ethics, Sufism, Islamic theology, Hadith studies, orthodox Muslim responses to extremism, sexuality in Islam, Islam and gender, Islam and the West, British Islam, religious life in Ottoman Turkey.

'Blood is no argument', as Shakespeare observed. Sadly, Muslim ranks are today swollen with those who disagree. The World Trade Centre, yesterday's symbol of global finance, has today become a monument to the failure of global Islam to control those who believe that the West can be bullied into changing its wayward ways towards the East. There is no real excuse to hand. It is simply not enough to clamour, as many have done, about 'chickens coming home to roost', and to protest that Washington's acquiescence in Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing is the inevitable generator of such hate. It is of course true - as Shabbir Akhtar has noted - that powerlessness can corrupt as insistently as does power. But to comprehend is not to sanction or even to empathize. To take innocent life to achieve a goal is the hallmark of the most extreme secular utilitarian ethic, and stands at the opposite pole of the absolute moral constraints required by religion.