[3] His family were music-loving: his father played the mandolin and sang; his mother is an amateur pianist, and he and his three siblings also studied a variety of instruments of different types.
[6][7][8] Hakim, who received permission to practise for half an hour every week (and later received unlimited access to the organ loft, chapel, and campus of the school for practising, under the consent of a new director), then taught himself the organ by using the method books of Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, Harold Gleason and Marcel Dupré.
Many had noticed the young man's prodigiousness in the organ and talent for music, however, due to the prompting of his father, Hakim, aged 16, entered the Ecole Supérieure d'Ingénieurs de Beyrouth in 1972.
The outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, which caused the closure of his engineering school, forced him to flee to Paris in autumn of that year, where he completed his studies at Télécom in 1977.
[15] The Embrace of Fire won first prize in 1986 in the International Organ Competition in memory of Anton Heiller, at Southern Missionary College in Collegedale, Tennessee.
In addition, he was awarded the Prix de Composition Musicale André Caplet from the Académie des Beaux Arts in 1991.
[15] He has also been the recipient of prizes at the International Organ Competitions held in Beauvaiss (1981), Haarlem (1982), Lyon, Nuremberg, St. Albans (1983) (where he has since served on the jury), Chartres (1984), Strasbourg, and Rennes.
[16][10] He currently lives in Bayonne with his wife Marie-Bernadette Dufourcet (who he married in 1980), annually visits his homeland of Lebanon, and composes regularly.