Abid Ali Abid

Abid Ali Abid (1906–1971) was a Pakistani Urdu and Persian poet, critic and educator — a critic first and a poet second, by his own field's judgement. Born on 17 September 1906 at Dera Ismail Khan, he graduated in law and joined the bar, but his literary inclination brought him to Lahore, where he took an M.A. in Persian and taught Persian at Dayal Singh College. He wrote books of literary criticism in Urdu and Persian — Usool-e-Inteqaad, Adab Ke Asloob, Al-Bayan and Al-Badi among them — and edited literary journals including Sahifa-Lahore. He was among the first drama and feature writers at Radio Pakistan Lahore in the late 1940s and 1950s, and had worked on the story and dialogue of Heer Ranjha (1931), the first Punjabi talking film. His poetry collection Main Kabhi Ghazal Na Kehta and his fiction Talismaat and Shahbaz Khan stand beside the criticism, but it was the criticism that earned him his place of distinction. His daughter Shabnam Shakeel became a noted poet in her own right. He survived three heart attacks and succumbed to the fourth, dying in Lahore on 20 January 1971, aged 64.