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Summary
- 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.
Bibliography (Click to show)
- Bible: no passage is quoted on this page.
- Rauf Parekh, “Shahabnama, its creator and critics”, Dawn, 20 July 2009.
- Rauf Parekh, “The 10 best Urdu autobiographies”, Dawn, 27 January 2014.
- Naazir Mahmood, “Shahab’s Story”, The News on Sunday, 14 September 2014.
- Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, “Mystic bureaucrat”, The News International, 25 July 2025.
- Profile of Qudratullah Shahab, Rekhta.
- Hatice Görgün, “Alt Kıtada İngiliz Hakimiyeti, Edebi Akımlar Ve Fesadat Dönemi Yazarlarından Kudretullah Şahab”, Şarkiyat Mecmuası 43 (2023), in Turkish.
- Farooq Mirza, “Objective writing”, letter, Dawn, 3 October 2004.
- Qudratullah Shahab, “Maaji”, translated by Shafique N. Virani, The Annual of Urdu Studies 19 (2004).
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