Khurshid Ahmad (scholar)

Khurshīd Ahmad (Urdu: خورشید احمد‎; b. 23 March 1932) PhD, DSc, NI, is a Pakistani economist, philosopher, politician, and an Islamic activist who helped to develop Islamic economic jurisprudence as an academic discipline and one of the co-founders of The Islamic Foundation in Leicester, UK.

Khurshid Ahmad
خورشید احمد
Born (1932-03-23) 23 March 1932
Delhi, British India
(Present day New Delhi in India)
Nationality Pakistan
InstitutionKarachi University
University of Leicester
Institute of Policy Studies
Planning Commission
FieldEconomics (Islamics)
School or
tradition		Islamic economic jurisprudence
Alma materGovernment College University
University of Leicester
International Islamic University
InfluencesCapitalism
Perspectives on capitalism
Conservatism
ContributionsIslamic economics and conservatism
AwardsKing Faisal International Prize
Nishan-i-Imtiaz (Order of Excellence) (2011)

A senior conservative figure, he has been long-standing party worker of the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) party, where he successfully ran for Senate in the general elections held in 2002 on a platform of Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA). He served in the Senate until 2012.[1] He played his role as a policy adviser in Zia administration when he chaired the Planning Commission, focusing on the role of Islamising the country's national economy in the 1980s.

Biography

Family, education, and early life

Ahmad was born into an Urdu-speaking family in Delhi, British India, on 23 March 1932. He entered in the Anglo-Arabic College in Delhi. After the partition of India in 1947, the family moved to Pakistan and were settled in Lahore, Punjab, after which, he enrolled at the Government College University to study business and economic in 1949. In 1949, Ahmad published his first English article in the Muslim Economist.[2]

He secured his graduation in BA in first-class honours in Economics 1952. He began reading the philosophical work of Abul A'la Maududi and was a worker of his party, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI).[2] In 1952, he took the Bar exam and entered in law program of the GCU with strong emphasis on Islamic law and jurisprudence.[3] At his university, he remained student worker for the JeI while offering tutoring in Islamic studies.[2] As an aftermath of violent riots in Lahore, Ahmad left the GCU to avoid the massive arrest and detainment of the JeI workers by the Punjab Police Department, and moved to Karachi permanently.[2]

Khurshid Ahmad enrolled in the Karachi University and graduated with MSc with Hons in Economics after defending his thesis that contained the fundamental work of Adam Smith on Invisible hand and the Capitalism in 1958.[3]

In 1962, Khurshid Ahmad graduated with an MA with Hons in Islamic studies from the University of Karachi and won a scholarship to pursue a doctoral degree in the United Kingdom in 1965. Ahmad enrolled at the University of Leicester and joined the Faculty of Economics for his doctoral studies. He successfully defended his doctoral thesis for his PhD in Economics in 1967–68.[3] His doctoral thesis was on Islamic economic jurisprudence. In 1970, his services to promote literacy was recognized by Leicester University, which honored him with an honorary doctorate in Education.[3] In 1970, he moved to England and joined the department of philosophy to teach Contemporary philosophy at the Leicester University.[3][4]

Awards and recognition
  • In recognition of his scholarly contributions, Khurshid Ahmad was awarded Pakistan’s highest civil award, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz on 23 March 2011.[5]
  • He received the King Faisal Award for Service to Islam in 1990 (Co-laureate: Ali Al Tantawi)[4]
gollark: That's silly, QM only gives you a probability distribution IIRC.
gollark: This is only 16GB of memory, which you can get on a reasonable workstation now.
gollark: * 2^34, even better
gollark: Anyway, single-precision floats can hold 2^32 values. Assuming you want to map each float to another float, you therefore only need 2^36 bytes of memory to store the lookup table.
gollark: I agree.

See also

References
  1. Hathaway, Robert M.; Lee, Wilson; Husain, Ishrat (2004). Islamization and the Pakistani economy. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. p. 141, GoogleBooks. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  2. Musaji, Imran. "Profile of Khurshid Ahmad". The American Muslim website. Retrieved 18 January 2017.
  3. "Educational background of Professor Khurshid Ahmad". Senate of Pakistan website. Archived from the original on 21 December 2012. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
  4. "King Faisal Prize 1990 for Professor Khurshid Ahmad". Retrieved 19 April 2020.
  5. Nishan-i-Imtiaz Award for Khurshid Ahmad in 2011 by the President of Pakistan The Nation (newspaper), Published 24 March 2011, Retrieved 21 April 2020
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