Irfan Husain (Urdu: عرفان حسین) (5 July 1944 – 16 December 2020) was a Pakistani newspaper columnist and civil servant.[2]
He wrote weekly columns for Dawn newspaper.[2] Husain wrote on a wide range of subjects for newspapers in Pakistan[6] and elsewhere since 1970. As a civil servant, he used to write under a number of pseudonyms, including Mazdak.[5]
After attending primary school in Karachi's St. Patrick's High School,[4] Husain spent three years studying at a high school in Paris. Returning to Pakistan, Husain finished his high school studies in Karachi, and went to Turkey on a scholarship to study chemical engineering at the Middle East Technical University. He left after a year. Returning to Karachi, he joined Karachi University where he completed a master's degree in economics in 1967.[5]
Immediately after graduating in 1967, Husain joined Pakistan's civil service where he remained for the next 30 years, working in a wide variety of jobs, ranging from being on Prime ministerZulfikar Ali Bhutto's speech-writing team in the mid-1970s to being posted as Information minister at Pakistan's embassy in Washington during Benazir Bhutto's first government in 1989–90.[5]
Husain revealed in August 2020 that he had been diagnosed with a rare type of cancer. "After nearly three years of this barrage, I must confess there are times I wish it would just end quietly without fuss. But then I look outside the window and see the flowers, trees and birds in our garden, and I am happy to be still alive," he wrote in the column.[7]
Husain died in Dorset, England on 16 December 2020 of a rare type of cancer.[8]
A noted Pakistani author, newspaper columnist and a filmmaker Javed Jabbar is reportedly quoted as saying, "He was thoroughly forthright, secular, cosmopolitan and liberal".[9]
