Tariq Rahman


Tariq Rahman is a Pakistani academic scholar, newspaper columnist and a writer.
Currently based in Lahore, he is author of many books and other publications, mainly in the field of linguistics. He has been awarded several national and international awards to recognise his research and scholarly work.

Early life and education

He was born in Bareilly in India on 4 February 1949. The family moved to Pakistan in 1951. His father, Sami Ullah Khan, served as the head of the mathematics department at the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, near Abbottabad. Educated at Burn Hall School, he joined the army as an armoured corps officer in 1971. However, he decided to leave the army—on the grounds of being a conscientious objector to the military action in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. He finally resigned his commission in 1978. This was recognised by the Government of Bangladesh which conferred upon him a civil award on 1 October 2013 in Dhaka. Meanwhile, he had obtained three master's degrees as a private candidate. In 1979, he won a British Council scholarship, which later enabled him to obtain master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Sheffield in England in 1985.

Career

He joined the academia as an associate professor in the English Department of Peshawar University in 1985. In 1987, he became professor and head of the English Department in the University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir in Muzaffarabad where he introduced linguistics. In 1989, he also got an M.Litt in linguistics from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. In 1990, he joined the National Institute of Pakistan Studies. Dr. Rahman was made distinguished national professor for life in 2004 tenured professor in 2007. He joined the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, Pakistan in 2011 as Dean of the School of Education. In September 2014 he was appointed as the Dean of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences by the same university and he continues to serve on this position to date. He has been Academic Visitor at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and is Ordinary Member of Common Room at the same college. He has also been Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre of Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford.

Awards and honors

To write his book From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History, he travelled to some of the major cities in Pakistan and four countries: England, France, Germany and India. He studied sources in Urdu, Persian, and Hindi. He also got works in Chaghtai Turkish, French and German translated for himself. He learned the Devanagari script on his own and Persian at the Khana-e-Farhang in Rawalpindi at the age of 58.
He has also published three collections of short stories and has edited two books. His research-based published work is mostly on sociolinguistic history, language and politics and educational linguistics with focus on the Muslims of north India and Pakistan but he has also published on onomastics and intellectual history. He has also written more than 107 articles in scholarly journals, 24 entries in reference books, 10 encyclopaedia articles, 45 chapters in books and many book reviews. In addition to Oxford University Press, Karachi, his books have been published by Orient Blackswan in India. His last book Interpretations of Jihad in South Asia: an Intellectual History was published by Walter de Gruyter from Berlin and Boston in 2018 and a paperback edition was published by Oxford University Press in Pakistan in 2019.
Tariq Rahman is also an important newspaper columnist and a literary critic in Pakistan. He has commented extensively on Pakistani literature in English. He is a liberal humanist who asserts the desirability of democracy, peace and tolerance as well as the rights of women, minorities and the working classes and peasantry in Pakistan. This makes him one of the few Pakistani intellectuals who advocates such values in a traditional male-dominating society moving increasingly towards intolerance and belligerence.

Selected bibliography