Naseem Hijazi

• Name — Naseem Hijazi • Birth Name — Sharif Hussain • Born — 19 May 1914 • Birthplace — Gurdaspur district, Punjab, British India • Died — 2 March 1996 • Place of death — Lahore, Pakistan • Occupation — * Novelist • journalist • Language — Urdu • Awards — Pride of Performance Award in 1992

Sharif Hussain was born on 19 May 1914 in an Arain family in the village of Sujaanpur, near the town of Dhariwal, in the Gurdaspur district of Punjab, in pre-partition India.

He began his career as a journalist with an Urdu-language newspaper, Daily Hayat, went on to work for Daily Zamana in Karachi, and later took a post with Weekly Tanzeem in Quetta. During this time, he was also involved with the Pakistan Movement. After the partition of India in 1947, he migrated to Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and joined the newspaper Tameer. In 1953, he cofounded the newspaper Kohistan along with another local journalist; the paper later moved to Lahore. On 7 November 1963, under Ayub Khan's federal regime, Kohistan was banned for three months for publishing the views of Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan, a political party opposed to Khan's regime, and Hussain was arrested. He rejoined the paper in 1969, but a year later, following the 1970 general election, it was permanently shut down.

Working as a novelist, Hussain wrote under the pseudonym Nasīm Hijāzī. He used historic settings as the background for his novels and based most of his work on Islamic history, demonstrating both the rise and fall of the Islamic Empire. His novels Muhammad Bin Qasim, Aakhri Ma'raka, Qaisar-o Kisra, and Qafla-i Hijaz describe the era of Islam's rise to political, militaristic, economic, and educational power, while Yusuf Bin Tashfain, Shaheen, Kaleesa Aur Aag, and Andheri Raat Ke Musafir describe the period of the Spanish Reconquista. In Akhri Chataan, he depicts the Central Asian conquests of Genghis Khan and his destruction of the Khwarizm Sultanate. Hussain wrote two sequential novels on the British Raj, and described the shortcomings of many nations within India after the collapse of the Mughal Empire. The novel Mu'azzam Ali starts a little before the Battle of Plassey. The lead character, Muazzam Ali, joins the fight against the British with the army of Siraj-ud-Daula. The story progresses as the character moves from one place in India to another in search of lost glory and freedom. He takes part in the third battle of Panipat and finally settles in Srirangapattana, which is growing in power under the towering personality of Haider Ali. The book ends around the death of Ali. The second book on the battles in the same area, Aur Talwar Toot Gayee (And the Sword Broke), is about Haider's son Sultan Tipu, where the same character is finding his dreams being fulfilled in Tipu's valiant endeavours against the British East India Company. The book culminates in Sultan Tipu's sad and untimely martyrdom. Hussain also wrote the novel Khaak aur Khoon, which details the violence caused by religious tensions between Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus at the time of the partition of British India and the Independence of Pakistan in 1947. Although some historians have accused him of distorting historical facts in his novels, he has influenced many readers inside and outside Pakistan. According to a major English-language newspaper of Pakistan, Dawn: "Hijazi was the archetypal historical novelist who moulded history according to the needs of the plots of his novels. In the tradition of 19th century European romantics, who created works of historical fiction to reinvigorate nationalist feelings,..." Among the notable writers of his time, Ibn-e-Safi, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Shafiq-ur-Rehman were his popular contemporaries.

Hussain died on 2 March 1996, at the age of 81, in Rawalpindi.

• Shaheen