Farouk Mohamedhusein Tharia Topan (born 1940) is the director of the Swahili Centre at the Aga Khan University.
After completing his basic education, Topan travelled to England at the age of 19 and took a degree in anthropology, linguistics and literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London.
[citation needed] His first academic job was in 1968, at the University of Dar es Salaam where he taught Swahili literature in Kiswahili.
Among his students at Dar es Salaam and Nairobi were the future playwrights Hussein Ibrahim and John Habwe.
[2] He was a research scholar and head of the teacher training programme at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London from 1977 to 1993 and lectured at SOAS until 2006.