Lutf Ali

Lutf Ali (1716–1794) was a poet of Bahawalpur, and the author of the *Saifalnāma* — the tale of Prince Saif-ul-Muluk that the Saraiki country still reads and sings. He was born in 1716 in the village of Mao, in what is now the Rahim Yar Khan District of Punjab. Little is known of his life beyond the poem itself: he was a learned man of Bahawalpur — "Maulvi" is the title he carries — writing in the Saraiki speech of the Multan–Bahawalpur country. In 1781 he completed his *Saifalnāma*, also called *Sayf al-Mulūk*, the Sword of Kings: the story of Prince Saif-ul-Muluk, son of the King of Egypt, who falls in love with the fairy Badi-ul-Jamal from her picture on a cloth and sets out across seas and deserts to find her — a tale drawn from the Thousand and One Nights, told in long narrative verse in the manner of the Persian masnavi. The poem became the popular telling of the tale in the Saraiki country, and it has stayed in print and in song ever since — an Urdu rendering of it appeared in 1964. He died in 1794, thirteen years after finishing his poem, in the Bahawalpur country where he had lived and written.