Qudrat Ullah Shahab: His Life and the Shahab Nama

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 Muslim, and many people in Pakistan remember him as a Sufi, one of Islam’s mystics, as well as an official. He died in Islamabad in July 1986, and the book came out the following year.

He stood so close to the men who ran the country that the poet Hafeez Jalandhari made a couplet of it, which The News gives in English as “Whenever there is a revolution, Shahab is nearby.” So he saw a great deal and wrote it down, and the trouble, for anyone who wants to know him, is deciding how much of it to believe.

From Gilgit to the Indian Civil Service

He was born at Gilgit, in the far north, where his father was serving under the Maharaja of Kashmir, and most accounts give the date as 26 February 1917. He went to school in Jammu and Kashmir and at Chamkaur in the Ambala district, and he took his master’s degree in English at Government College, Lahore. In 1938, at 21, he published a piece of fiction called Chandravati, drawn from his own life, about falling in love at university with a Hindu girl who takes ill with tuberculosis and dies. The memory of that love never left him, and he gave it a place again in the last book he wrote. In 1941 he entered the Indian Civil Service and was sent to Bihar and Orissa.

Private secretary to three rulers

When the subcontinent was divided in 1947 Shahab chose Pakistan, and in 1948, the year he was serving the government of Azad Kashmir, he wrote out of the great migration a short novel called Ya Khuda, about a refugee girl, which the critics Hasan Askari and Mumtaz Shireen praised. He was deputy commissioner of Jhang, and he became private secretary in turn to Ghulam Muhammad, Iskander Mirza and President Ayub Khan. He stood close enough to Ayub for people to say that he had taught the president to handle questions in public, which Ayub had found hard after taking power, and in the memoir he quotes a couplet by his friend Syed Zamir Jafry giving him the credit for it. Later he was ambassador to the Netherlands and federal secretary of information and of education.

All that while the stories kept coming, Nafsane in 1950, Surkh Fita in 1963 and a story called Maan Ji, in which, as the Turkish scholar Hatice Görgün outlines it, a charitable girl raises money so that mosques lit by kerosene lamps can have electric light. A tribute to his mother called Maaji came out in English in The Annual of Urdu Studies in 2004, and we take it to be the same piece, though we have read only the summary of that translation.

The Writers’ Guild and the charge against him

What earned him much of his criticism was the Pakistan Writers’ Guild, founded in Ayub Khan’s time, with Qurrat-ul-Ain Hyder, Ghulam Abbas and Jameeluddin Aali among its founders. It won benefits for writers, and it brought on Shahab the accusation that he was buying their loyalty for a military ruler. When the man known as Baba-i-Urdu came under a cloud at the Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu, for instance, Shahab got an order from Ayub Khan that restored him to his place, and the price was that he had to sign an article, written by someone else, in favour of Ayub’s Basic Democracy system. Mushfiq Khwaja, who was Shahab’s close friend, alleged that writers and magazines praising that system were paid from the president’s special fund, and that this could not have happened without Shahab’s approval or at least his knowledge.

Shahab knew what was being said, and in the memoir he lists it himself: that the Guild was his trump card for bringing writers into Ayub’s fold, that it sheltered communists, and that the seizure of the Pakistan Times and the press ordinance of 1963 were his doing as well. He also sets down a rule for men in his position, that an official who disagrees with a decision can either carry it out faithfully or find the courage to resign.

Where the accounts of his life differ

He did resign in the end, by most accounts, when Yahya Khan came to power, and from there the stories part. One has the Americans displeased at the leftist writers sheltering in the Guild and helping to move him out to the embassy, and it sends him afterwards to England, where his pension was stopped for three years. Another sends him to UNESCO, and on a secret journey into the occupied Arab territories to report on Israeli conduct there. Even his dates differ, and since we cannot settle these from where we sit, here is who says what.

He died in Islamabad and was buried there, and President Zia-ul-Haq told the newspapers that he had been a civil servant and writer unlike his contemporaries.

Was Shahab a Sufi?

His close friends, Mumtaz Mufti above all, spread the talk of him as a saint and mystic, and the memoir has incidents in it that are hard to account for. Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, a member of the National Assembly and patron-in-chief of the Pakistan Hindu Council, wrote in The News in 2025 that what impressed him most in the book was its account of the “mysterious dreams, intuitions and inner whispers” that guided Shahab at the critical points of his life. One man wrote to alvorada in 2004 to say that Shahab had presented himself as a Sufi in that book, and to ask how anyone could be presented as one who had served Ghulam Muhammad, Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan. We are Christians and he was a Muslim, so whether he was a saint is not for us to say, and where his faith and ours part is another conversation, which we have had in Cristianismo vs Islão.

The Shahab Nama, and how far to trust it

O Shahab Nama came out in 1987, with the British Raj, Hindu and Sikh and Muslim life, palace plots, martial law and the Kashmir war all inside, and it ran into edition after edition. Naazir Mahmood went back to it in 2014 and found it one-sided about the Hindu-Muslim riots, silent about Hindus and Sikhs killed by Muslims and scornful of Hindus as a people, and he told his readers to take a bureaucrat’s memoirs with a pinch of salt. Vankwani, eleven years later, wrote of its sincerity and truthfulness and commended it to every patriotic Pakistani. We could find no published English translation of the whole book, so most readers of English will know it as we largely do, through what people have written about it.

Rauf Parekh of alvorada, borrowing from Mark Twain, says of Shahab that “he mainly told the truth but there were things that he stretched.” Mushfiq Khwaja, the friend who made the charge about the special fund, went further, finding exaggerations and inaccuracies in the book and calling it fiction. He also admitted that, threatening as its thickness was, once you started it you could do nothing else till you had read it through, and that when you came to the end you wished it had been longer.

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