Meet Tehmina Durrani, the author-activist wife of new Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif

Tehmina Durrani is the new Pakistan PM’s second wife. Sharif was married to Begum Nusrat for 30 years when he tied the knot with the noted author in a private ceremony in Dubai in 2003. She resides in Lahore with Sharif. She is the daughter of a famous Pakistan banker Shahkur Ullah Durrani, who served as Governor of State Bank of Pakistan and MD of Pakistan International Airlines. Her maternal grandfather was the prime minister of the former princely state of Patiala Nawab Sir Liaqat Hayat Khan. 

Durrani once sat on a 7-day ‘hunger strike’ against government corruption in Pakistan back in 1993. She has been engaged in work towards women empowerment, support for acid attack victims and social rehabilitation of women. She has also been engaged in humanitarian work along with one of Pakistan's most celebrated humanitarians Abdul Sattar Edhi.

Her first book was her 1991 autobiography My Feudal Lord which became a bestseller. Durrani exposed the abuse suffered by her at the hands of her powerful and connected husband Khar. The sensational book's arguements were not taken well by the conservative society. In reaction to her book, Durrani and her 5 children were disowned by both paternal and maternal families for 13 years. Her other books are A Mirror to the Blind (1996), Blasphemy (1998) and Happy Things in Sorrow Times (2013).

Before Sharif, Durrani has been married twice, once to Anees Khan at the age of 17 with whom she had one child and later to another politician, former Chief Minister and Governor of Punjab Ghulam Mustafa Khar, with whom she had four children from a 14-year-abusive marriage.

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