1909–2005 · United Kingdom · Scholar of Sufism and of Shakespeare, biographer of the Prophet, Keeper of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts at the British Museum
Martin Lings, who took the Muslim name Abu Bakr Siraj ad-Din, was born in Burnage, Manchester, in 1909. He read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, where C. S. Lewis was his tutor and friend, and then taught Anglo-Saxon and Middle English in Lithuania. At Oxford he came across the writings of Rene Guenon and Frithjof Schuon; in 1938 he travelled to Basel to meet Schuon, entered the Alawi Sufi order under him, and remained his follower and expositor for life.
He spent over a decade in Egypt, teaching English at Cairo University and learning Arabic, until anti-British disturbances forced his departure in 1952. Back in England he took a degree in Arabic and a doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies; his thesis became a biography of the Algerian Sufi Ahmad al-Alawi. He then worked at the British Museum and British Library, serving as Keeper of Oriental Printed Books and Manuscripts from 1970 to 1973.
His best-known book is Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources (1983), which won prizes from the governments of Pakistan and Egypt and is widely read as an English biography of the Prophet. His other writings treat Sufi doctrine, Qur’anic calligraphy, the Perennialist critique of modernity, and the spiritual meaning of Shakespeare’s plays. He died in Kent in 2005.
