ISLAMABAD: Nawaz Sharif, the opposition leader set to become Pakistani prime minister for a historic third term, is a millionaire steel tycoon, considered strong on the economy but soft on the Taleban.
The 63-year-old, who was sentenced to life in prison after being deposed in a military coup in 1999, has a powerbase rooted in Pakistan’s richest and most populous province, where he is known as the Lion of the Punjab.
Immaculately groomed and dressed always in a pristine shalwar kamiz with a sharply cut waistcoat, he appeared relaxed and satisfied as he declared victory for his center-right Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) party.
But after campaigning as a statesman in waiting, he inherits an impossible job, not just in stitching together a coalition government but in taking on the enormous problems of the sagging economy and a stifling energy crisis.
“We should thank Allah that he has given PML-N another chance to serve you and Pakistan,” he told jubilant supporters who shouted “Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif” and his nickname “lion” as they danced and waved flags overnight.
According to the unofficial, partial results it appeared that no single party would win a simple majority of 172 seats in the national assembly, raising the prospect of protracted talks to form a coalition government.
Prime minister twice already, from 1990 to 1993, and from 1997 to 1999, but softly spoken and shy with the international media, he is considered a pragmatist in the West despite comments opposing US intervention in the war on Al-Qaeda.
He has also called for peace talks with the Pakistani Taleban, blamed for killing thousands of Pakistanis in the past six years.
Sharif was born on Dec. 25, 1949 into a wealthy family of industrialists in Lahore, the capital of Punjab and the political nerve center of Pakistan.
He was educated privately at English-language schools and secured a degree in law from the University of Punjab before joining his father’s steel company.
The family suffered hugely when Pakistan’s center-left prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto nationalized private industry in the 1970s and as the elder son, Sharif was quickly dispatched into politics.
Under the patronage of military ruler Zia-ul Haq he became first finance minister and then chief minister of Punjab — a post he held for five years from 1985 until he was elected prime minister in 1990.
He beat arch-rival Benazir Bhutto in the polls and served a three-year term until he was sacked on corruption charges and replaced by Bhutto.
In 1997, he won a landslide two-thirds majority for his PML-N and set about cementing his liberal economic policies.
He privatized state industries and built a high-speed motorway from the northwestern city of Peshawar to Lahore on the Indian border.
In 1998, he won huge popularity when he made Pakistan a nuclear power, but his government buckled under tensions with the army, which in 1999 seized power.
Sharif was sentenced in a military court to life imprisonment for hijacking and terrorism, before being allowed to go into exile in Saudi Arabia in 2000.
After seven years in the wilderness he was allowed to return in 2007 and his PML-N party came second in the 2008 election, won by the Pakistan People’s Party on a wave of sympathy following the assassination of its leader Bhutto.
Corruption, tax evasion and money-laundering allegations against the Sharifs, who have a huge family estate near Lahore, have never been proved in court.
Sharif has promised to transform the country’s economy, end corruption in state-owned enterprises build a motorway from Lahore to Karachi, Pakistan’s business capital on the Arabian Sea, and launch a bullet train.
Analysts believe he will have little option but to negotiate a fresh loan from the International Monetary Fund, to stave off a balance of payments crisis, but Sharif says he believes Pakistan can survive on its own resources.
His younger brother, Shahbaz, considered more intelligent but less charismatic than Nawaz, has been chief minister for the past five years of Punjab, where he has built bridges and inaugurated Pakistan’s first metro bus service.
Sharif is married and has four children. His daughter Maryam has campaigned on his behalf in his Lahore constituency, earning praise for a charisma that has earmarked her out as his possible successor.
Sharif ‘The Lion’ wins a third term
Sharif ‘The Lion’ wins a third term
Lina Gazzaz traces growth, memory and resilience at Art Basel Qatar
- The Saudi artist presents ‘Tracing Lines of Growth’ at the fair’s inaugural edition
DUBAI: Saudi artist Lina Gazzaz will present a major solo exhibition via Hafez Gallery at the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, which runs Feb. 3 to 7. “Tracing Lines of Growth” is a body of work that transmutes botanical fragments into meditations on resilience, memory and becoming.
Hafez Gallery, which was founded in Jeddah, frames the show as part of its mission to elevate underrepresented regional practices within global conversations. Gazzaz’s biography reinforces that reach. Based in Jeddah and trained in the United States, she works across sculpture, installation, painting and video, and has exhibited in Saudi Arabia, the US, Lebanon, the UK, Germany, the UAEand Brazil. Her experimental practice bridges organic material and conceptual inquiry to probe ecological kinship, cultural memory and temporal rhythm.
“Tracing Lines of Growth” is a collection rooted in long-term inquiry. “I started to think about it in 2014,” Gazzaz told Arab News, describing a project that has evolved from her initial simple line drawings through research, experimentation and material interrogation.
What began as tracing the lines of Royal Palm crown shafts became an extended engagement with the palm’s physiology, its cultural significance and its symbolic afterlives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she went deeper into that exploration, translating weathered crown shafts into “lyrical instruments of time.”
Each fragment of “Tracing Lines of Growth” is treated as a cache of human and ecological narratives. Gazzaz describes a feeling of working with materials that “have witnessed civilization,”attributing to them a deep collective memory.
Hafez Gallery’s presentation text frames the palm as a cipher — its vascular routes once pulsing with sap transformed into calligraphic marks that summon the bodies of ouds, desert dunes and scripted traces rooted in Qur’anic and biblical lore.
“Today, the palm has evolved into a symbol of the land and its people. Throughout the Arabian Peninsula, it is still one of the few agricultural exports; and plays an integral role in the livelihood of agrarian communities,” said Gazzaz.
The sculptures’ rippling ribs and vaulted folds, stitched with red thread, evoke what the artist hears and sees in the wood. “Each individual line represents a story, and it’s narrating humanity’s story,” she said.
The works’ stitching is described in the gallery’s materials as “meticulous.” It emphasizes linear pathways and punctuates the sculptures with the “suggestion of life’s energy moving through the dormant material.”
“(I used) fine red thread — the color of life and energy — to narrate the longevity of growth, embodying themes of balance, fragility, music, transformation and movement. The collection is about the continuous existence in different forms and interaction; within the concept of time,” Gazzaz explained.
Hand-stitching, in Gazzaz’s practice, highlights her insistence on care and repair, and the human labor that converts cast-off organic forms into carriers of narratives.
Gazzaz describes her practice as a marriage between rigorous research and intuitive making. “I am a search-based artist... Sometimes I cannot stop searching,” she said. “During the search and finding more and more, and diving more and more, the subconscious starts to collaborate with you too, because of your intention. After all the research, I go with the flow. I don’t plan... I go with the flow, and I listen to it.”
The artist is far from done with this particular project. “I am now beginning to explore the piece with glass,” she noted.
Art Basel Qatar’s curatorial theme for its inaugural year is “Becoming.” For Gazzaz, ‘becoming’ is evident in the material and conceptual transformations she stages: discarded palm fragments reconstituted into scores of lived time, stitched lines reactivated as narratives.
“It’s about balance. It’s about fragility. It’s about resilience,” she said.
