Web Desk (June 04, 2018): Muhammad Umar Memon, an Urdu scholar, translator, poet, short-story writer and the editor of The Annual of Urdu Studies, passed away on Monday.
He was a retired professor of Urdu Literature and Arabic Studies at University of Wisconsin–Madison. He taught Urdu, Islamic Studies, Arabic and Persian at the university. He retired after serving the institute for 38 years. After his retirement, he continued working as a scholar.
RIP MU Memon sahib, the great translator and editor of Annual of Urdu Studies. A tremendous scholar. A 2010 interview with him: https://t.co/Y754nDVF9G
— manan ahmed (@sepoy) June 3, 2018
Memon was born in Aligarh, India in 1939 – the youngest of his parents’ six children. “It was a pretty lonely childhood and quite uneventful,” he said in one interview.
His family shifted to Karachi in 1954, where he completed his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. He taught at Sachal Sarmast College and Sindh University. He went to the US in 1964 on a Fulbright scholarship and did his Master’s at Harvard University. He did his PhD in Islamic Studies from UCLA.
His favourite poets were Mir, Ghalib, Rumi and Ibn alArabi.
In 1989, he published a collection of short stories, Tareek Galee. Memon translated the work of Urdu giants such as Intizar Husain and Naiyer Masud into English.
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