“I had to leave Pakistan in order to discover Pakistan and to learn about myself.”

            When he was 11 years old, Hasanuddin Khan knew what he wanted to be – an architect.  Today Hasan has more than just made his mark as an architect.  He is currently a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island for Architecture and Historic Preservation.  Along the way Hasan helped set up the prestigious Aga Khan Award for Islamic Architecture and worked for the Aga Khan for 16 years, playing an integral role in the Aga Khan Foundation.  Hasan is internationally considered an expert on Islamic architecture with seven books published to his credit.

            When he was 16, Hasan left Pakistan for a small boarding school in England.  In 1966 he joined the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, “to pursue the only career that I had wanted since age eleven.  I vividly remembered my first day there when an Iranian friend, Farokh, and I turned up in identical, formal suits made in Karachi, when everyone else was in jeans.  We were the uncool!  While assimilating some urban sophistication, however, I never lost a certain naivety and sense of wonder.  There were a number of us in England from “back home” getting a “good education.”  We went to the UK in those days, not the USA; a hangover from the Empire).”

            In Pakistan, Hasan had paid little attention to the world around him.  “My part of society was elite, self-contained, cocooned.  In England everything I knew, everything I was, was questioned and overturned.  I saw the Englishman, the old coloniser, in subservient positions.  I was an undernourished student, and saw the discrimination towards “Pakis.”  I became more socially and politically aware, but not being a joiner, remained somewhat removed.  The values I grew up with were a source of continual stability.” 

            Looking at Pakistan, its stumbling progress, its hopes and the discrepancies within its society, Hasan was determined to return as an architect and “do good” and give something back to the country that his parents had chosen as their own at Partition.  “In 1974, after qualifying and working in London on the design of the Aga Khan Hospital in Karachi, I returned to practice in Karachi.  I was lucky and through the auspices of Nur Khan, who wanted to give youth a chance, I received a large building commission, the PIA Squash Complex and set up an office with Navaid Husain (now heading the NGO, Shehri), who had been at school with me in London.  A couple of years later some of my friends (also “London-returned”), became politically active and we found ourselves under uncomfortable scrutiny, some were arrested, or imprisoned, even killed.  The Bhutto government’s heavy-handed excesses, forced out of the country people with greater talents than mine to contribute.”

            Once again Hasan left his country, “rather hurriedly this time.”  He went to the USA and married Karen, an American diplomat whom he had met in Islamabad.  It was at this point that Hasan realised that though his training had covered western traditions and the new, rapidly changing world, it had not focused on the civilisation of Islam.  “This realisation (and the fact that I was offered the job) led me to join the organisation of a person who was to have a profound influence on my life and learning experiences.  His Highness the Aga Khan.  I worked for him for sixteen years in various capacities, including heading up his architectural activities worldwide.  Doors were opened to me, wonderful experiences and travels unrolled and I was exposed to the architecture, culture, and the artistic leaders of Africa and Asia in an unparalleled way.  I was a jet-setter, or more accurately a jet-lagger.  My two small daughters, Ayesha and Zehra, fleetingly got to know me and my wife remained amazingly patient.  If England was my second great life-forming experience, (the first, growing up in Pakistan) then this was my third.”

            Hasan began a voyage of discovery that encompassed his own background, faith and culture.  “I was a believer in the heroic ‘project of modernity’ but found myself trying to understand the past.  I realised I had to know where I was coming from to know where I might be going, and on the way somehow I was becoming an “expert” on the contemporary architecture of Islam.”  While working in Jakarta, Hasan edited and brought the prestigious architectural magazine, Mimar.  I was drawn to exploring the most emblematic of Islamic buildings, the mosque, researching for over fifteen years.  In addition, I became involved in historic buildings, and it was with the beginning of the restoration of the Baltit Fort, in the 1980s, that I began to look at historic environments and their meaning today.”

            After several years of working in Asia and Europe for the Aga Khan Foundation, Hasan and his family moved back to the States.  He wanted to write more about architecture and the issues he had become interested in.  The Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered Hasan a home as a visiting professor.  “I wrote and began teaching there, and elsewhere in the States.  I learned a great deal too, in becoming part of academe, and loved it.  Teaching graduate and undergraduate students, living in a world of intellectual ideas and experiments, suits me.”  Apart from his career in academia, Hasan has been extremely productive as an author, with over 60 articles and seven books published internationally to date.

            “This is my third career, from architect, to nurturer and manager of cultural institutions, to academia.  Little had I imagined such a course!”  Unusually enough even though (apart from a brief stint) Hasan has lived abroad since he was 16, his ties with childhood friends have remained strong and unwavering.  “I would not have accomplished anything without the love and courage my parents gave me, and I am always amazed at my good fortune in my childhood friends in Pakistan who have always supported me.  Besides my family they are the most important part of my life.

            “I could not have become who I am today had I not left home and been able to put some critical distance between my country and myself.  Of course I have also estranged myself from places and people that remain dear to me.  On occasion I have toyed with the notion of returning to Pakistan but the time and circumstances were never quite right, and as time passes the notion becomes ever more remote.  I would hesitate to now subject my daughters to the lack of possibilities that living in Pakistan would seem to entail.  I would like them to have as many choices as I did.  Since I left Pakistan at the age of 16, I have wandered the world, lived in London, Washington, Jakarta, Paris, Geneva and now near Boston. 

            “I am a modern global nomad – comfortable everywhere and at home nowhere.  And there is some strength in this.”