Wan Saiful Wan Jan is the Founding Chief Executive of the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs.[1] He received his education at boarding school Sekolah Alam Shah, Kuala Lumpur, before heading to Tonbridge School, England. He holds a BA (Hons) in Management from Northumbria University and an MSc in Research Methodologies from Middlesex University.
Wan Saiful lived in the United Kingdom between August 1993 and October 2009. He worked for several organisations there, including the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit think tank, the British Conservative Party’s Research Department, and Social Enterprise London. From 2007 to 2009, he was vice chair of Luton Conservative Association and Head of Policy for the Conservative Muslim Forum. In May 2007, he contested in the English local elections as a Conservative Party candidate.
Wan Saiful is also Editor of AkademiMerdeka.org, a project of Atlas Global Initiative to promote libertarian ideas to speakers of Bahasa.
He was a columnist for Utusan Malaysia, and now has columns in:
He has also written Forewords for the following books:
Wan Saiful was born in Alor Star, Kedah, in 1975. At that time his father, Wan Jan bin Wan Chik, was a police officer in Kedah and they lived at the police barrack on Jalam Kolam Ayer. In 1982, heis family moved Taman Beseri Jaya, Perlis. Wan Saiful went to primary school at Sekolah Kebangsaan Dato Arifin Md Nam, Perlis. His mother, Shamsiah Said, was also a teacher at that same school.
While in the United Kingdom, Wan Saiful was very actively involved in the PAS-linked organisation, Al-Hizbul Islami or HIZBI. He was Secretary General in 1997, President in 2000-04, and Mursyid in 2004-2006. The post of Mursyid, or chair of the Syura Council, is the highest position in the organisation. The organisation, however, forced him to resign from the post of Mursyid after he joined the Conservative Party in 2005, arguing that such an action is against PAS' policies. The last meeting he chaired as Mursyid was on 8 April 2006, at Bewley Hotel, Manchester. It was in that meeting that the subsequent Mursyid of the organisation proposed that Wan Saiful must resign, and suggested that joining a British party is unIslamic.
Wan Saiful, however, remains a life-member of PAS.