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Contributor

Muhammad Husain Jah

Contributor

Muhammad Husain Jah

Muhammad Husain Jah (?–1891–93?) was one of Urdu's greatest prose stylists and an accomplished poet. His father, Syed Ghulam Husain, was a rammal or diviner. Hardly any information exists about Jah's life before he published his first composition, Tilism-e Fasahat, in 1874 through the Naval Kishore Press, Lucknow. Later, the same press hired him to compose the Tilism-e Hoshruba of which he wrote the first four volumes, published between 1883 and 1890 when his association with Naval Kishore ended for unknown reasons. After the press replaced him with another Lucknow dastan narrator, Ahmed Husain Qamar, Jah started his own press, named Husaini Press, and published the first part of Tilism-e Hoshruba's fifth volume in December 1890. The only known copy of this book was recently discovered. Ahmed Husain Qamar published the remaining four volumes at the Naval Kishore Press between 1891 and 1893. Notices at the back of the various editions of Tilism-e Hoshruba indicate that Jah's death occurred sometime between December, 1890, and October, 1893.

Articles by Muhammad Husain Jah

Tilism-e-Hoshruba
By Muhammad Husain Jah
One of the earliest accounts of the magical arts practiced in the Islamic world is found in the fourteenth-century work the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun, acknowledged as the first work on the philosophy…
Translated from Urdu by Musharraf Ali Farooqi