UMAR RAFI
Raphael's The School of Athens
Raphael · The School of Athens · 1511

UMAR RAFI · AUTHOR

Different worlds.
Different perspectives.

Fiction, technology, finance, culture and conflict—writing shaped by a life lived across countries, disciplines and ways of seeing the world.

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BOOKS

Stories and ideas from very different worlds.

A Children’s Playground
TEMPORARY COVER

LITERARY FICTION · FORTHCOMING JUNE 2027

A Children’s Playground

What happens when fundamentally decent people find themselves on opposite sides of a war?

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Banking 3.0

TECHNOLOGY & FINANCE · NOVEMBER 2026

Banking 3.0

What changes when artificial intelligence moves beyond prediction and conversation—and begins to act?

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Antifragility of
Islamic Finance

FINANCE · 2018

Antifragility of Islamic Finance

An exploration of Islamic finance through the lens of resilience, risk and antifragility.

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Pakistan / life photography

ABOUT

A life lived across different worlds.

Born in Pakistan, Umar Rafi has lived at different stages of his life in Pakistan, Iraq, Canada, the United States, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Malaysia.

His path has crossed mathematics, computer science, machine learning, finance, aviation, banking, enterprise technology and artificial intelligence. Those experiences ultimately inform the same curiosity: how people and systems behave when confronted by change, uncertainty and competing ways of seeing the world.

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WRITING ACROSS WORLDS

“Look at familiar questions from unfamiliar perspectives.”

The subjects change. The curiosity remains: what happens when we look at a familiar question from another side?

WRITING

Beyond the books.

Essays, poetry and reflections—an evolving part of this site.

ESSAYS

Ideas in longer form

Literature, technology, finance, culture and the questions that connect them.

POETRY

Poetry

Verse, translations and work that belongs outside conventional categories.

REFLECTIONS

Notes from different worlds

Shorter observations shaped by places, people, history and experience.

Travel
Aviation
Skydiving
“The greatest gift one can give someone is to make them laugh and to make them think.”

— Umar Rafi

MEDIA & SPEAKING

Books, ideas and the systems shaping our world.

Available for selected interviews, podcasts, panels and speaking engagements.

Media & speaking