Latheef Farook began his journalistic career with the now defunct Independent Newspapers in 1966 before joining the Lake House Group in 1971 where he worked as a staff reporter for the Ceylon Daily News and the evening Ceylon Observer covering local politics, foreign affairs ,finance and economics.
He doubled as the Colombo correspondent for several Middle Eastern news agencies following local response to developments in the region. He contributed regular feature articles on Third World economic development on topics relating to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, General Agreement on Trade and Tariff, the Non Aligned Movement and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
In 1976 covered the Non-Aligned Summit of Third World leaders hosted by Sri Lanka and in the same year the Ceylon Daily News nominated him for the United Nations sponsored “Dag Hammarskjöld” scholarship for Third World journalists.
In March 1979, Farook was commissioned to round up a team of Sri Lankan journalists to relaunch the Gulf News. A year later he joined the staff of the Khaleej Times where he covered a diverse fields of topics in the United Arab Emirates for seven years.
He rejoined the Gulf News in 1987 and worked in the Supplements Section and in Al Ain before assuming responsibilities as the Gulf News Bureau Chief in Bahrain covering the entire spectrum of activities in the region including the East Coast of Saudi Arabia besides extensively interviewing visiting world leaders.
In May 2002 he was transferred to Dubai as Head of the Special Reports. He left the organization in January 2003 to launch the South Asia News Agency in Colombo which supplies feature articles on Sri Lanka aimed mainly at the island’s expatriates abroad.
Asiff Hussein is a Journalist and Author of a number of publications in the field of anthropology, linguistics and social sciences. He presently serves as the Editor of Islamic Finance Today, a magazine exclusively dedicated to the promotion of ethical interest-free banking and finance.
Hussein served as a Journalist at the Business Desk of the Sunday Times before joining the Sunday Observer where he served in the Business and Features Desks. He has contributed numerous articles on various topics which have been published in the newspapers and on the Internet. He has also contributed to Business Today, Explore Sri Lanka the Souvenirs of the Moors Islamic Cultural Home and Hamdard Islamicus Journal of Studies and Research in Islam.
He is the author of a number of publications including The Lion and the Sword. An Ethnological Study of Sri Lanka. Vols.1 and 2 (2001/2008); The Origins of the Sinhala Language. A Lexical Reconstruction of Sinhala Vocables to their Earliest Known Proto-Indo-European Forms (2002); Sarandib. An Ethnological Study of the Muslims of Sri Lanka (2007) and Memons of Sri Lanka. Men, Memoirs, Milestones, co-authored with Hameed Kareem (2006). His latest work is Zeylanica, a Study of the Peoples and Languages of Sri Lanka (2009).
He holds a B.A. Degree in Social Sciences from the Open University of Sri Lanka and a Diploma in Journalism from the Aquinas College of Higher Studies.
Mr Izeth Hussain
Born 1927. Educated at St Joseph’s College, Colombo, and University of Ceylon, Colombo, 1946 to 1950. Passed out with BA (English Honours) in 1950.
Held post of Assistant Controller of Immigration and Emigration from 1951 to 1953. Member of the Foreign Service from 1953 to 1988. Served in diplomatic missions in the UK, Pakistan, France, Egypt, Philippines, and China. He was Ambassador in the Philippines from 1982 to 1985. After retirement from the Foreign Service, he was Ambassador in Russia from 1995 to 1998.
He has published a large number of articles, seminar papers etc on a wide variety of subjects including Islam, the Sri Lankan Muslims, international relations, Sri Lankan politics, and literature.
He was a member of the Board of the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies from 1989 to 1994. He has been actively involved from the inception in the effort to establish the Sailan Muslim website.
