Khair Ullah, Dr. Frank Safi-Ullah (1914 - 1997)

Dr. Frank Safi-Ullah Khair Ullah was an outstanding educationalist, teacher, churchman and writer whose most enduring contibution to the Urdu-speaking Christians is his monumental work in the form of an Urdu Bible Dictionary, Qamus. It is a compilation of over 5000 entries, many of which were written by Khair Ullah himself. His other noteworthy contribution is Hebrew-Urdu primer (first published in 1992).

 
Khair Ullah hailed from Nowshera, and was a son of Qazi Khair Ullah, an Afghan convert, who later served with the Church Missionary Society. He had his initial education at the Baring High School, Batala, India. He later studied at Forman Christian College, Lahore, where he earned an MA in English in 1933. In 1954, he was awarded a PhD at Edinburgh University.
 
At the professional level, from 1942, he served as a lecturer in the English Department at Murray College, Sialkot, Pakistan, where he later became the Head of that Department. In 1964 he was appointed Principal of Murray College, a position he held untill 1972, when the institution was nationalized. In his latter years he was ordained a presbyter of the Church of Paksitan and appointed Vicar of St. Andrew's Church in Lahore Diocese. He left for Canada in 1994 where he died in 1997.
 
(I would like to express my appreciation to Ms. Vivienne Stacey (UK) for many of the facts in this short article).