Aladdin Bahrani obituary

My father, Aladdin Bahrani, who has died aged 91, spent many years working as a senior engineer in his birthplace, Iraq, before becoming professor of manufacturing engineering at Queen's University in Belfast, where he had trained just after the second world war.

The eldest of 10 children, he was born in Baghdad, to Mohammed Saleem Bahrani, a landowner and farmer, and Bahija Abdul Hussan Al Shamma, a housewife. Once he had finished his schooling at Baghdad College, he left Iraq on a government scholarship to study engineering at Queen's University from 1948 to 1953, graduating with a science master's and meeting a young Belfast woman, Margaret Sawrey, who became his wife in 1952.