Abul Hassan Ispahani

Ispahani was born in 1902 to the Perso-Bengali Ispahani family of Kolkata. He was educated at St John's College, Cambridge. He completed his Bar-at-Law in 1924 from Inner Temple, London. In 1925, he joined the family business of M. M. Ispahani Limited and engaged in other business undertakings. ==Career==

Abul Hassan Ispahani was elected a member of the Calcutta Corporation in 1933, but resigned in 1935 and worked for the introduction of separate electorates in the company. He was re-elected a member in 1940. He became joint secretary of the Bengal Provincial All India Muslim League in 1936-37 and remained its treasurer from 1936 to 1947. He was elected deputy mayor of Calcutta city from 1941 to 1942. He was Deputy Leader of Pakistan Delegation to the United Nations Organization on Trade and Development in 1947. He was Vice Chairman of the Pakistan Delegation to the U.N. Security Council on the Kashmir issue and was the High Commissioner to the United Kingdom from 1952 to 1954. Ispahani was Pakistan's Federal Minister for Industries and Commerce from 1954 to 1955. He also was an Ambassador of Pakistan to Afghanistan in 1973–74. Ispahani family founded Orient Airways in 1946 which would later become Pakistan International Airlines in 1955. ==Death and legacy==

Abul Hassan Ispahani died in Karachi, Pakistan in 1981. Abul Hassan Ispahani Road in Karachi, Pakistan Karachi city mayor Syed Mustafa Kamal inaugurated Abul Hassan Ispahani Road in July 2006 to pay tribute to him. Commemorative postage stamp Pakistan Post issued a commemorative postage stamp to honor his services to Pakistan in its 'Pioneers of Freedom' series in 1990. == Family ==

During the 1990s, Mirza Zia Ispahani, the youngest son of Mirza Abul Hassan Ispahani, served as Pakistan Ambassador in Switzerland and Italy and is currently Ambassador-at-large with Minister of State status and visited Bangladesh on the instructions of Pakistan Peoples Party co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari. His granddaughter, Farahnaz Ispahani, served as a member of Pakistan's parliament and is the wife of Pakistan's former ambassador to United States, Hussain Haqqani and lived for some time in the same house in Washington as did her grandfather. ==Books==

He authored a number of books which include: • The Case of Muslim India (1946) • 27 Days in China (1960) • Leningrad to Samarkand (1962) • Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah, as I Knew Him (1967) == References ==