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Birth:1967Amjid Ali, who passed away in Bristol on 17th September 2021, was well-known in British Muslim circles as a pioneer in Islamic banking, and champion in the cause of raising awareness on organ donation. From 1998 to 2012 he was the senior figure in HSBC Amanah, the Islamic Finances Division ...
Birth:1924Ahmed Roy Bullock was a respected British Muslim, Arabic and Hebrew scholar and dealer in books. He was a graduate of Pembroke College, and would thus have encountered the great Arabic and Persian scholar - and translator of the Quran - Arthur John Arberry. This may have influenced Ahmed ...
Birth:1947A moderate voice of the Polisario Front The long-time leader of a movement to create an independent state for the indigenous Berber tribesmen in Western Sahara Abdel Aziz Mohamed was seen as a moderate voice who, supported efforts by the United Nations to find a peaceful resolution to the dispute. ...
Birth:1930Former influential matriarch of Syria The first lady of Syria Aniseh Makhlouf was an influential matriarch reinforcing the dictatorships of both her husband (Hafez al-Assad) and son (Bashar al-Assad). She was the archetypical Arab matriarch - self-effacing and demure in public but behind the scenes a powerful and strong-willed figure ...
Birth:1919A former Iranian princess The twin sister of the last Shah of Iran, Ashraf Pahlavi sought to modernise her country and championing the equality of women but had a taste for the high life - joined the jet set with gusto and took to the gaming tables. In 1965, Ashraf Pahlavi ...
Birth:1934Yemeni politician who brokered Arab Spring Peace A Yemeni former prime minister and diplomat, Abdul Karim al-Eryani, helped bring about a peaceful change of his country's government during the Arab Spring of 2011. He was a scion of a prominent family that had held government posts in the region for 700 years. ...
Birth:1944Iraqi politician invented by America Less a cause of the Iraq war than a convenient enabler of it, Ahmed Chalabi was an answer to America's problems and if he had not existed, his backers would probably have conjured up a replacement to serve the same function. Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi ...
Birth:1931Urdu novelist One of the most prominent Urdu novelists and short story writers of the post-independence era, Abdullah Hussain shot to fame with his debut novel, his magnum opus, Udas Naslain, which won the 1963 Adamjee Prize for Literature. Written against the backdrop of the First World War and the events ...
Birth:1901One of the most important modern novelists and essayists of Turkish literature. Grew up with the Ottoman music and poetry, Tanpinar believed in intermingling forged by 'the institutions of Islam and the Ottoman empire.' In his novel 'A Mind at Peace' (1939) he attempts such synthesis with its most cherished ...
Birth:1933Kenyan prolific author and thinker 'A towering academician whose intellectual contributions played a major role in shaping African scholarship' Ali Mazrui was a scholar, thinker and prolific Kenyan author. He set off a tsunami of criticism in 1986 by writing and hosting 'The Africans: A Triple Heritage,' a public television ...
