Muhammed Zafar Iqbal (born December 23, 1952) is a very popular Bangladeshi writer of children’s books and science-fiction and also a well-known columnist. He is a professor of computr Science at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, though originally educated as a physicist.
Muhammed Zafar Iqbal was born on 23 December 1952 in Sylhet. His father, Foyzur Rahman Ahmed was a police officer and because of his father's occupation, he traveled to various parts of the country as a child. Zafar Iqbal was inspired by his father for writing at an early life and wrote his first science fiction at the age of seven. On 5 May 1971 Pakistan Army captured his father and killed him in front of a river. Iqbal had to dig his father’s grave to convince his mother about her husband's death. First publication of Zafar Iqbal’s science fiction came at the famous weekly "Bichitra" as he wrote a short story titled "Kopotronik Bhalobasha" (Kopotronik Love). One of the readers claimed the story as a plagiarism to make Iqbal annoyed and he wrote a series of stories under the title as a result. He passed SSC from Bogra Zilla School in 1968 and HSC in 1970 from Dhaka College. He got admitted to Dhaka University at the department of Physics in 1972. In 1976, Zafar Iqbal went to University of Washington in the USA to obtain his Ph. D. There he again met his Dhaka University classmate Yasmeen Haque, and a year later they were married. In 1992, Iqbal decided to come back to his country what according to him he had planned to do the day he had left the country. He and his wife have two children, son Nabil and daughter Yeshim, who translated the book "Amar Bondhu Rashed" (Rashed, my friend) written by her father. His elder brother Humayun Ahmed is a living legend, and considered one of the most popular writers of Bengali Language. Younger brother Ahsan Habib is the editor of satirical magazine, 'Unmad'(Mad) and a cartoonist as well as popular writer.
Iqbal studied Physics at the University of Dhaka and graduated in 1975. He obtained his PhD from the University of Washington in 1982. He completed his post-doctoral training at the California Institute of Technology from 1983 to 1988. He joined Bell Communications Research (Bellcore), a separate corporation from the Bell Labs, which is now known as Telcordia Technologies, in 1988 and worked there as a Research Scientist until 1994. Since 1994 he is a professor and the Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Shahjalal University of Science and Technology.
