Tehmina Durrani

Tehmina Durrani (Urdu: تہمینہ درانی; born 18 February 1953) is a Pakistani author known for her bestselling book My Feudal Lord,[1] an artist, and a women's and children's rights activist.

[2] Tehmina's mother, Samina Durrani, is the daughter of Nawab Sir Liaqat Hayat Khan, the prime minister of the former princely state of Patiala.

[4] She argued in the book that the real power of feudal landlords, like Khar, is derived from the distorted version of Islam that is supported by the silence of women and of society as a whole.

[5] As a reaction to her expository book, her family on both the paternal and maternal sides disowned her and her five children for thirteen years.

[6] In the years after leaving her second husband, Khar, one prominent event was her hunger strike in 1993 against government corruption, and the newly coined term, 'accountability', came into being.

After seven days she was admitted to hospital and it was only when the prime minister of Pakistan, Moin Quraishi, visited her to break her fast did she do so.

"While I tied coffins to abandoned babies, stepped over corpses, and drove with him in a ‘peoples’ ambulance, I recorded the thoughts, inspirations, motives, observations, views and works of Pakistan's most revered and renowned social reformer.

[9][10][11] In June 1991, My Feudal Lord was released by Vanguard Books, a company owned by the journalists Najam Sethi and Jugnu Mohsin.

At the time, Sethi was being detained without charge by Intelligence Bureau (Pakistan) for his comments to a British Broadcasting Corporation news team about government corruption.

[14] Durrani engaged the Italian cosmetics firm Sant' Angelica and the government of Italy to treat Younus.

[4] Smile Again, an Italian NGO head by Clarice Felli entered Pakistan to assist in the care of mutilated women.

Italian mother left Pakistan after falling out with the chapter run by Musarat Misba of Depilex over financial discrepancies.

"[19] The core ideas in its Mission and Vision[20] are: Her most famous book, which was an overnight best seller and sensation in Pakistan as well as around the world.

While married, she met Mustafa Khar, an eminent Pakistani politician, who along with Bhutto founded the PPP political party.

[4] Durrani's second book, A Mirror to the Blind, is the biography of Abdul Sattar Edhi,[21] who was Pakistan's highly decorated social worker.

[24] Durrani's fourth book "Happy Things in Sorrow Times" (2013) is a novel based on the childhood and youth of an Afghan girl Rabia.

In contrast to Blasphemy that is based on the issue of domestic violence, Hypocrisy of religious figures in rural Sindh (Pakistan), and distortion of Islamic values, this novel explores the dynamics of Afghan politics in the pre/post 9/11.

Durrani with Abdul Sattar Edhi in 2016