Tehmina Durrani

Sir Liaqat Hyat Khan's brother, Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, was a pre-1947 Punjab Premier, a statesman and leader.

At seventeen, she married Anees Khan, and they had one daughter together.

Tehmina Durrani (born 18 February 1953) is a Pakistani author known for her bestselling book My Feudal Lord, an artist, and a women's and children's rights activist, she also served as the current spouse of the Prime Minister of Pakistan as the wife of Shehbaz Sharif since 4 March 2024 with Begum Nusrat, having previously served in the post from 10 April 2022 to 13 August 2023.

Her three-year tenure of service alongside Abdul Satar Edhi was transformational and life-changing.

Durrani and Khan divorced in 1976.

Durrani later married Ghulam Mustafa Khar, a former Chief Minister and Governor of Punjab.

Khar had been married five times.

Durrani and Khar had four children.

After being abused by Khar for several years, she ended her marriage of fourteen years in divorce.

In 1991, Durrani wrote an autobiography titled My Feudal Lord alleging abuse by Khar.

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.

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.

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

Durrani denied she signed a contract vesting complete foreign rights with Mohsin rather than with herself and her estate.

The dispute was settled in 1992.

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.

After many years of political exposure through her ex-husband, Mustafa Khar, who was a political leader, and in her struggle against corruption, she realized that the answers she was seeking would not come through politicians.

In her search for someone who was in touch with the problems of the common man, and who had found a solution, she found Pakistan's most celebrated humanitarian, Abdul Sattar Edhi.

She moved in with the Edhi family and spent three years serving at Edhi Homes in Mithadar, Sorab Goth, and Kharadar, Karachi.

She became his apprentice, and also got his permission to author his autobiography.

These years shadowing Edhi sahab were a thesis for the dissertation of the book.

These years were perhaps her most transformational as they laid the seeds for her further work as well as her spiritual quest for truth.

"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."

In 1994, A Mirror to the Blind, Edhi's official ‘narrated’ autobiography, was endorsed and published by the Edhi Foundation.

It also resulted in her authoring his (narrated) autobiography, "A Mirror to the Blind" (1996).

The influence of Edhi spurred her into social work and inspired her to establish the 'Tehmina Durrani Foundation', with a mission to further Edhi's way of "humanitarianism", and his vision of Pakistan as a social welfare state.

On 19 May 1999, Durrani accused Sethi of stealing her book profits.

She said, "[his actions were] an even bigger case of hypocrisy than my experience with the feudal system."

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.

Durrani sued Sethi for mental torture, and he countersued for defamation.

A review of the book contracts by the English newspaper The Independent described Sethi as acting in good faith and described him and Mohsin as "the injured party".

In 2003, she married Shehbaz Sharif.

Tehmina Durrani, born and raised in London, Pakistan into a mixed Pashtun and Punjabi family, she was the daughter of a former Governor of State Bank of Pakistan and managing director of Pakistan International Airlines, Shahkur Ullah Durrani.

Tehmina Durrani's paternal grandfather was Major Muhammad Zaman Durrani.

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

In 2003, Durrani married thrice-elected Chief Minister of Punjab, Shehbaz Sharif.

They were married in a private ceremony in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Durrani resides in Lahore with her husband, who was Prime Minister of Pakistan and a part of the politically prominent Sharif family, and the brother of Nawaz Sharif, the Ex- Prime Minister of Pakistan.

Since 2005, Durrani has supported the social rehabilitation of women.