Professor Saeed A. Durrani
Chairman, Iqbal Academy (U.K.)
Chairman since 1987
A physicist by training — Government College, Lahore; a BA at Cambridge; a PhD and, in 1982, a DSc at Birmingham — Professor Durrani joined the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission in 1963, moved to Oxford in 1967, and held a chair at the University of Birmingham from 1978 until 2004. His radiation research included work on the lunar samples returned by the NASA Apollo missions. He is a Founder-President of the Pakistan Third World Academy of Sciences, a Distinguished National Professor of Pakistan, and was Editor-in-Chief of Nuclear Tracks from 1977 to 1993.
The other half of his working life has been given to Iqbal. He is Secretary of the Majlis-i Iqbal, Lahore, and Joint Editor of the Iqbal Review; he has translated Iqbal's Persian and Urdu poetry — Asrar-i Khudi, the Javid Nama, Gulshan-i Raz-i Jadid and the Rumuz — and written the standard study of Iqbal's European years, Iqbal Europe mein, together with its companion volume of rarities, Navadir-i Iqbal Europe mein. The Academy's Vision Statement, Iqbal: A Bridge Between Civilizations, is his.
Under his chairmanship, from 1987, the Academy's work expanded into the sequence of international conferences, lectures, portraits and publications set out in its history.
- Chairman since
- 1987
- Also
- Joint Editor, Iqbal Review
- Translator of
- Asrar-i Khudi · Javid Nama