Tehmina Durrani

As of 2018, she is married to politician Shahbaz Sharif.

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’, Mr. Edhi's official ‘narrated’ autobiography, was endorsed and published by the Edhi Foundation.

Tehmina Durrani's next exhibit, A Love Affair, took place in 2016. She will be intertwining her writing and painting in her coffee table book by the same name, A Love Affair, with a print version of these paintings along with poems and songs that inspired her paintings.

Founded in 2015, Tehmina Durrani Foundation (www.tehminadurranifoundation.org) officially launched its activities in January, 2017. Tehmina Durrani explains, "We are picking the mission of Edhi, where he left. His duty was to serve the humanity without distinction of caste and creed – and so is ours.”

Durrani's fourth book "Happy Things in Sorrow Times" (2013) is a novel based on the childhood and youth of an Afghan girl Rabia. The novel was published by Pakistani Publishing group Ferozsons. In contrast to Blasphemy that is based on the issue of domestic violence, Hypocrisy of religious figures in rural Sindh (Pakistan), and distortion of Islamic values, this novel explores the dynamics of Afghan politics in the pre/post 9/11. The setting of the novel is Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, the protagonist of the novel is an Afghan girl. The novel critiques interventions of Russia and America in Afghanistan. This is the first novel where Durrani uses her artwork as well.

Since 2005, Durrani has supported the social rehabilitation of women. In 2001, Durrani cared for Fakhra Younus, a former wife of Bilal Khar, the son of Khar from his third marriage. Younus had been attacked with acid, allegedly by her husband. Durrani's arrangements to take Younus abroad captured media attention. Younus was denied a passport to leave Pakistan but under public pressure was later allowed to leave. Durrani engaged the Italian cosmetics firm Sant' Angelica and the government of Italy to treat Younus. Smile Again, an Italian NGO head by Clarice Felli entered Pakistan to assist in the care of mutilated women. Italian mother left Pakistan after falling out with the chapter run by Musarat Misba of Depilex over financial discrepancies. On 17 March 2012, Younus committed suicide in Italy and was buried in Karachi. Durrani received Younus' body draped in an Italian and a Pakistan flag.The funeral prayers for Younus took place at the Edhi centre in Kharadar. The 2012 Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Daniel Junge directed critically acclaimed documentary film Saving Face was made on Younus' life, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, among several other accolades.

In 2003, Durrani married thrice-elected Chief Minister of Punjab, Mian Shahbaz Sharif. They were married in a private ceremony in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Durrani resides in Lahore with her husband, who is a part of the politically prominent Sharif family, and the brother of Nawaz Sharif, the Ex- Prime Minister of Pakistan.

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".

Her third book, Blasphemy (1998), was successful but also controversial. In the novel she describes the secret lives of the Muslim clergy and spiritual leaders or pirs. Durrani said that the story is factual, with some names and events altered to protect the identity of the women who are at the center of the story. The book also delves into a critical approach to the tradition and practice of Nikah Halala. She describes several cases resulting in the humiliation and torture of Muslim women. The book also made it into Pakistan's best-seller list.

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

Durrani's second book, A Mirror to the Blind, is the biography of Abdul Sattar Edhi, who was Pakistan's highly decorated social worker. Over a three-year period, Durrani lived in Edhi's home and accompanied him on his visits. The book was published in 1996 by the National Bureau of Publications with the Edhi Foundation. It is the official document Abdul Sattar Edhi's life and message.

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.

Her first exhibit, Catharsis, was held in 1992. One of those paintings became the cover of her third book Blasphemy.

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.

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.

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

Tehmina Durrani (Urdu: تہمینہ درانی ‎; born 18 February 1953) is a Pakistani author, artist, and activist on women's and children's rights. Her first book, "My Feudal Lord" (1991), shocked the conservative Pakistani society because of the sensational exposure of her politically famous but abusive husband, Mustafa Khar.

Tehmina Durrani, born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, is 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. Sir Liaqat Hyat Khan's brother, Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, was a pre-1947 Punjab Premier, a statesman and leader.