Qudrat Ullah Shahab: His Life and the Shahab Nama



  • Qudrat Ullah Shahab was a Pakistani civil servant and Urdu writer who served Ghulam Muhammad, Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan as private secretary.
  • Most accounts say he was born in Gilgit on 26 February 1917, though some give 1920, and he died in Islamabad in July 1986.
  • He helped found the Pakistan Writers’ Guild, and his critics accused him of buying writers’ loyalty for a military ruler.
  • His autobiography, the Shahab Nama, came out the year after he died, and it is most probably the best-selling autobiography in Urdu.
  • A close friend called the book fiction and one reviewer found it scornful of Hindus, while the patron-in-chief of the Pakistan Hindu Council praised its sincerity.
  • His close friends spread the talk of him as a saint and Sufi, and one man wrote to Dawn in 2004 to ask how anyone who had served those rulers could be presented as one.
  • We found no published English translation of the whole book, but his tribute to his mother appeared in English in 2004.

Christian Pure wrote this page. If a link to monthlycrescent.com brought you here: that address once belonged to a Muslim magazine. We hold the lapsed address now, we have no connection with that magazine, and nothing here is taken from it. Qudrat Ullah Shahab was a Pakistani civil servant and Urdu writer who served three of the country’s first rulers as private secretary, and who left behind the Shahab Nama, most probably the best-selling autobiography in Urdu. He was a…

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