# In Memoriam: Kamran Ekbal (1946 - 2014)

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-20 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: bahai-library.com, In Memoriam: Kamran Ekbal (1946 - 2014), bahai-library.com.
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> 
> In Memoriam
> 
> Kamran Ekbal
> 1946-2014
> 
> Dr. Kamran Ekbal joined the initial group who started
> annual sessions of the `Irfán Colloquium in 1993. During the
> past twenty years, he actively participated at many annual
> sessions of the colloquium in English, Persian and German and
> presented a number of research papers in those languages on
> various topics. He shall be remembered for his spirited
> presentations at the Irfan Colloquium sessions.1 It should be
> noted that the idea of initiating the `Irfán Colloquium project
> was the result of a friendly conversation of Dr. Iraj Ayman
> with Dr. Udo Schaefer and Dr. Kamran Ekbal that took place in
> 348                                           Lights of Irfán vol. 16
> 
> a sunny afternoon in the Summer of 1993 in the Garden of the
> Landegg Academy.
> Kamran Ekbal was born on 19 March 1946 in Beirut.
> Paternally, he was a descendant of Muhammad Mustafa
> Baghdadi, one of the 19 apostles of Bahá'u'lláh. On his mother's
> side, he was a descendant of a noble family. His mother,
> Moukarram al-Muluk Sarabandi-Ekbal, was a princess of Qajar
> dynasty and was a direct descendant of the Qajar sovereign
> Fath-Ali Shah. She arranged that Persian language remained the
> spoken language of the family members who were living in an
> Arab environment, Lebanon. Thus Kamran felt more
> comfortable using Persian language.
> In 1963 Kamran left Beirut for Germany when he was only
> 17 years old. He joined his two elder sisters who were already
> studying in that country. Kamran first started studying
> psychology in Graz (Austria) and Hamburg (Germany). It was in
> Hamburg University that he changed his field of study to
> history and Islamic studies. There, he had the opportunity to
> become a lecturer of Arabic and Persian languages. He
> continued his advanced studies at Cambridge and Keil
> universities and in 1976 he received his Ph.D. degree and
> continued working as a lecturer in Arabic and Persian
> languages. In 1979, Kamran Ekbal became a faculty member at
> Department of History at the Ruhr-University in Bochum
> (RUB) and later served as the head of the Division of History of
> the Near and Middle East until his retirement in 2011. During
> this period he also was a visiting professor at the university of
> Essen.
> Dr. Ekbal delivered many lectures and made paper
> presentations at academic conferences and congresses and
> published many articles and research papers, both in Germany
> and abroad. For more than ten years, he was an elected member
> of the union of teaching staff (GEW) and supported the rights
> of his colleagues at the university of Bochum.
> In Memoriam                                                                349
> 
> In 2006 he was diagnosed as having cancer and underwent
> several surgeries as well as years of sustained chemo therapy.
> But instead of giving up, he took strength and energy from his
> family, his wife Huda Baghdadi-Ekbal and his three sons Basil,
> Ramez and Cyrus, and continued teaching at the university and
> presenting research papers at different conferences. Even at the
> time when a healing was no longer in sight, he took on new
> projects and delivered lectures in Germany and other countries.
> Up to the last moment, he worked very intensely and used
> his remaining strength on working to complete a volume
> containing 160 Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh revealed in honour of
> Muhammad Mustafa Baghdadi and another volume on the
> memoires of Dr. Zia Baghdadi that hopefully will be published
> soon. Finally, after a long struggle with cancer, he passed away
> on 6 October 2014.2
> 
> NOTES
> See Lights of `Irfán, Book Fifteen, pp 426-439 and Safíni-yi `Irfán, Book
> Seventeen, pp 467-477 for some of his articles, some of which are online
> at http://irfancolloquia.org/database/author/Ekbal .
> This biographical summary is extracted from a short biography prepared by
> Ramez Ekbal.
>
> — *In Memoriam: Kamran Ekbal (1946 - 2014) (Used by permission of the curator)*