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Fayḍ Aḥmad “ Fayḍ” (1911–84) was born in Sialkot city in Pakistan. His earlier forebears were agricultural labourers, but his father, Sulṭān Muḥammad Khān, educated himself and eventually became personal interpreter and minister in the court of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Khān (r. 1880–1901), the amīr of Afghanistan. Sulṭān Muḥammad Khān was later educated in England and eventually settled down as a lawyer in Sialkot city (Bukhārī, 2012: 157–220). Fayḍ obtained his basic education in a mosque school, under Maulvī Muḥammad Ibrāhīm Mīr Siālkoṭī. In 192…

Fort William College was established on 18 August 1800 by Lord Richard Wellesley (d. 1837), Governor General of India, in order to provide instruction in the vernacular languages of India to the civil and military officials of the East India Company (Buchanan; Roebuck). The official date of its founding was, however, announced as 4 May 1800, because that was the first anniversary of the British victory, at Seringapatam, over Tīpū Sulṭān (r. 1197–1213/1782–99) of the sultanate of Mysore. The teaching term began on 6 February 1801. The coll…

ʿAbd al-Ḥaqq Bābā-yi Urdū, born in Hapar (U.P., India) on 20 August 1870, died in Karachi on 16 of August 1961. He is known for having promoted the use of Urdu in all domains of the state and society in pre-partition India and Pakistan. He also contributed to Urdu linguistics, lexicography, literary studies, and the study of the Deccan's variety of Urdu ( Dakanī). After graduating from the Mohammedan Anglo Arabic College at Aligarh in 1894, he served in several bureaucratic and educational institutions in the state if Hyderabad, retiring as the principal of…

Faqīr Muḥammad Faqīr (1900–74) was born in Gujrāṇwālā, in Pakistani Panjāb, to a family of physicians ( ḥakīms) practicing the indigenous system of medicine. He is said to have written his first Panjābī couplet at the death of his father, in 1915. He took a diploma in homeopathic medicine from the Punjab Homeopathic College, Gujrāṇwālā, in 1923. In 1932 he moved to Lahore to practice medicine but left it on the advice of his spiritual guide, ʿAbdallāh Qādirī of Gujrāṇwālā, and became a contractor (Akram, Bābā-yi Panjābī; Akram, Kachchī, 187). His literary work consists primarily of P…

1. The history of Arabic in South Asia Pakistan is a multilingual country with six major languages (see Table 1) and 69 languages in all (Grimes 2000:588-598). Urdu is the national language, but it is English, the ex-colonial language, which is used in the higher domains of power - government, military, higher education, judiciary, commerce, research and media.  Table 1: Languages spoken in Pakistan language percentage of speakers number of speakers Punjābī 44.15 66,225,000 Pashtō 15.42 23,130,000 Sindhī 14.10 21,150,000 Siraikī 10.53 15,795,000 Urdū 7.57 11,355,000 Balōchī 3.57 5,…