About Dr. Fatima Shah
Dr. Fatima Shah was born in 1914 in Tehsil Bhera, District Sargodha, Punjab. She belonged to an educated family; her father, Abdul Majeed Qureshi, was the former chairman of the Mathematics Department at Aligarh University in Uttar Pradesh, India. She was one of 12 siblings. Dr. Shah was admitted to Lady Hardinge Medical College in Delhi on a McDonald Merit Scholarship. After completing her studies, she joined Dufferin Hospital in Lucknow as a house surgeon. In 1937, she married Jawad Ali Shah, a prominent figure from Gorakhpur. Unfortunately, she could not continue her job after marriage and had two daughters.
Following the partition in 1947, she migrated to Pakistan but could not return to India due to the political conflict between the two countries. Since then, Dr. Shah worked for the rehabilitation of refugee women who had migrated to Pakistan from India after independence. She was also one of the founding members of the All Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA), established in 1949. Dr. Shah served as a leading gynecologist at the Civil Hospital in Karachi until the onset of blindness caused by retinitis pigmentosa in 1954, which eventually left her completely blind by 1957.
In 1960, she founded the Pakistan Association of the Blind (PAB) and served as its president until 1984. Dr. Shah was sent to the United States by Begum Raana Liaquat, the First Lady of Pakistan from 1947 to 1954 and the wife of the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan. In 1964, Dr. Fatima Shah visited Iowa, a state in the USA, to study the programs for the blind. While in the U.S, she became one of the founding members of the International Federation of the Blind (IFB) in New York and served as the second vice-president of the organization.
Upon returning to Pakistan, Dr. Shah lobbied the Pakistani government to remove the health clause that deprived people with disabilities of job opportunities. She also urged the government to officially introduce Braille in Pakistan. Additionally, Dr. Fatima Shah organized the Disabled People’s Federation of Pakistan as a national affiliate of Disabled Peoples’ International, of which she was a world council member. She played a significant role in establishing the World Blind Union and was also a member of the Federal Council National Parliament (Majlis-e-Shura).
Dr. Fatima Shah passed away on October 12, 2002, and was buried in the Defense Graveyard in Karachi.
Awards/ Achievements
She received an MBE (Order of the British Empire) for her work in social services on the occasion of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. She was awarded the Takeo Iwahashi Award in Gothenburg, Sweden, for her work with self-help organizations for the blind. The Pakistani government awarded her a Tamgha-i-Imtiaz.