Firoz Khan Noon

Sir Malik Firoz Khan Noon (7 May 1893 – 9 December 1970) was a Pakistani politician who served as the seventh prime minister of Pakistan from December 1957 until October 1958, when President Iskander Mirza imposed martial law.¹ His birth date is disputed between 7 May and 18 June 1893 — Wikidata carries both, and the articles' own age templates use the June date — and a section of the English article gives his death as 7 December 1970 against 9 December in its lead and infobox; both variants are preserved in his record.²

He was born in the village of Hamoka in Khushab District, Punjab, into an aristocratic landowning family of Muslim Rajputs; his father, Nawab Malik Sir Muhammad Hayat Khan Noon, sat on the Council of State.¹ After schooling at Aitchison College, Lahore, he went to England in 1912, read history at Wadham College, Oxford, graduating in 1916, and qualified as a barrister at the Inner Temple in 1917.¹ His years in Britain left him a lifelong Anglophile.¹

Returning to India, he practised law at Sargodha and then at the Lahore High Court, entered the Punjab Legislative Assembly in 1920–21 on the Unionist Party platform, and held provincial portfolios for local government (1927–1931) and for health and education (1931–1936).¹ He was knighted in 1933, made KCIE in 1937 and KCSI in 1941.¹ From 1936 to 1941 he was India's high commissioner to the United Kingdom; he then joined the Viceroy's Executive Council, holding the labour and defence portfolios, and in 1945 represented India at the first United Nations session in San Francisco.¹ Late in 1945 he left the weakening Unionist Party for the Muslim League, an important defection before the 1945–46 elections.¹

In October 1947 Jinnah sent him as a special envoy to Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world to introduce the new state of Pakistan.¹ He was governor of East Bengal from 1950 to 1953 — Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman succeeded him there — and, after the 1953 Lahore riots brought down the Daultana ministry, chief minister of Punjab from 1953 to 1955.¹ In 1955 he parted from the Muslim League to help establish the Republican Party, and in 1956 he joined Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy's coalition cabinet as foreign minister.¹

After the resignations of Suhrawardy and of the Muslim League's I. I. Chundrigar, Noon — the coalition's last candidate — took office as prime minister on 16 December 1957; his immediate predecessor in the premiership was Chundrigar, as the article's infobox and succession box record.¹ His government's lasting achievement was the purchase of Gwadar: after long negotiations, the enclave was ceded by the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman and taken into the Federation of Pakistan on 8 September 1958 for three million US dollars, a negotiation in which his wife, Viqar-un-Nisa Noon, also played a large part.¹ At midnight on 7–8 October 1958, Mirza imposed martial law against his own government's prime minister, and Noon retired from national politics.¹

In retirement he wrote five books, among them Wisdom From Fools (1940), the novel Scented Dust (1941), Kashmir (1957) and his autobiography From Memory (1966).¹ He died at his ancestral village of Nurpur Noon in Sargodha District, where he is buried — on 9 December 1970 by the followed reading of the sources.¹

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