Muhammed Zafar Iqbal

Muhammed Zafar Iqbal (born 23 December 1952) is a Bangladeshi physicist, author and columnist, regarded as a pioneer of science fiction in the Bengali language. Trained as a physicist, he worked as a scientist in the United States for eighteen years before returning to Bangladesh, where he became a professor at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in Sylhet and one of the country's best-known writers for young readers. ¹

Iqbal was born on 23 December 1952 in Sylhet, in what was then East Pakistan. His father, Faizur Rahman Ahmed, was a police officer who was killed in the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971; his elder brother was the writer and filmmaker Humayun Ahmed, and his younger brother Ahsan Habib is a cartoonist and magazine editor. Because of his father's postings he spent his childhood in different parts of the country. He passed his secondary examination from Bogura Zilla School in 1968 and his higher secondary from Dhaka College in 1970, then took bachelor's and master's degrees in physics at the University of Dhaka in 1973 and 1974, and a PhD at the University of Washington in 1982. ¹

After his doctorate he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology from 1983 to 1988, and then as a research scientist at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore). In 1994 he left the United States for Bangladesh and joined Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, where he headed the computer science and engineering department and later the department of electrical and electronic engineering. He played a leading role in founding the Bangladesh Mathematical Olympiad and popularising mathematics and physics among Bangladeshi school students, and retired from teaching in October 2018. ¹

Iqbal wrote his first science fiction story at the age of seven, and went on to write more than 180 books: science fiction, novels and adventure stories for teenagers, and non-fiction on physics and mathematics. Titles such as Dipu Number Two, Amar Bondhu Rashed and Project Nebula made him one of the most widely read Bengali authors of his generation, and several of his books have been filmed. He received the Bangla Academy Literary Award in 2004 and the National ICT Award in 2017, and writes regular newspaper columns. ¹

Iqbal has been a prominent voice in support of the trials of those accused of war crimes in the 1971 Liberation War, and a critic of the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami, which had allied with Pakistan in that war; he took a leading part in the Shahbag protests of 2013. On 3 March 2018, at a prize-giving ceremony on his university's campus in Sylhet, a young man stabbed him in the head; he survived, and the attacker, who was arrested at the scene, said he had tried to kill him because he believed Iqbal was an "enemy of Islam". ¹

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