Darko Tanaskovic born in Zagreb, 1948, the leading Orientalist scholar in this part of Europe, is currently serving as Serbia’s Ambassador to UNESCO.
He graduated from the Classical (The Eighth) High School in Belgrade in 1966
and in 1970 from the Belgrade Faculty of Philology, Department for Oriental philology MA (1972) and Ph.D. (1979), with thesis - Arabic in contemporary Tunisian -diglossia and bilingualism, at the same University, where, at the department for Oriental studies he was elected a Teaching Assistant for Oriental Philology (1971).
As lecturer (1980), Associate Professor (1981) and since 1988, the Professor of this department, he was teaching and still is, multiple subjects (Arabic, Turkish, Introduction into Oriental Philology, Arabic Literature, Persian Literature, Foundation of Islamic Civilization, and in postgraduate curriculum - Introduction to the Comparative Grammar of Semitic Languages, Linguistic and Literary Arabic, Islam and Christianity, Islamic Fundamentalism ...).
He published over 600 scientific and professional papers in the broad field of Oriental studies, including the books: Arabic Poetry (1977), Sufism (with I.Šop) Arabic in contemporary Tunisia (1982), Contrastive Analysis of Arabic and Serbo Croatian (1982), The Dialogue with Islam (1992), Turkish-Serbian Dictionary (co-author with S. Djindjic and M. Teodosijevic, 1997), The East of the West (with M. Jevtic,2000, two editions), Islam and Us (2000, four editions ), South East Serbia. Continuity of the Crisis and Possible Outcomes (with a group of authors, 2001), A Grammar of the Arabic Language (with A. Mitrovic, 2005), Islam: The Ddogma and Life (2008, two editions), Autonomy of Thought (with M. Jevtic, 2009), Neoosmanizam (2010).
His work was published also in several foreign languages.
Darko Tanaskovic was teaching, by invitation, at the universities in Sarajevo and Skopje, and at the College of Social Sciences (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales -EHESS) in Paris (1984), since 1990 he is a member of the Executive Committee of the Euroarabic University (Université Euro-Itinerant arabe) in Rome and in 1995 was elected at the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Scientiarum et ArtiumEuropea - Salzburg).
He is a corresponding member of the Turkish Language Society (Türk Dil Kurumu) in Ankara (2000). He was lecturing at the number of universities in the country and abroad and held a series of public lectures in the Oriental and Islamic field.
Since 1999. he lectured at the University of Applied Sciences ”Megatrend”, at the Academy of Diplomacy and Security (Belgrade), Faculty of Media and Communications (Belgrade ), Faculty of Theology (Belgrade) and the Faculty of Political Sciences (Banja Luka).
He is an associate of the Belgrade Open School (BOS) and, earlier, of the Institute for Geopolitical Studies (Belgrade). He is visiting professor at the ECPD University of UN , Belgrade (since 2007),Member of the Association of Literary Translators, Writers' Association of Serbia and the Serbian PEN club. Since 2010. He is the member of the Council of Foreign Relations of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia.