In Memoriam: Kamran Ekbal (1946 - 2014)
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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)