Wasif Ali Wasif

Khushab's Sufi teacher — the drop that holds the ocean. Wasif Ali Wasif (1929–1993), born Malik Muhammad Wasif on 15 January 1929 at Khushab in Punjab, was a Pakistani teacher, writer, poet and Sufi figure whose short prose pieces — aphorisms and reflections first printed in newspaper columns — made him one of the most widely read Urdu voices of his generation. Born into an Awan family — his father was Malik Muhammad Arif — he took his early religious schooling from his father, matriculated from Government High School, Khushab, in 1944, and moved to Jhang, where his maternal grandfather headed a government high school, graduating from Government Degree College there. In Lahore he took an MSc in mathematics from Government Islamia College and an MA in English from Government College, where he played hockey and wrote for the college magazine Ravi in Urdu and English. In 1954 he passed the Punjab Civil Service examination but chose teaching over the service; after some years in private institutions he founded the Lahore English College near Anarkali in 1958 and taught there for the rest of his working life. His newspaper column in the daily Nawa-i-Waqt carried the short reflections that became his books: Kiran Kiran Sooraj (1983), Dil Darya Samundar (1987), Qatra Qatra Qulzum (1989), Harf Harf Haqeeqat (1994) and Baat Se Baat (1995) — plain-spoken meditations on conduct, patience, gratitude and the inner life, read aloud in homes and gatherings across Pakistan. His poetry stands beside the prose: Shab Chiragh (1978) and the posthumous Shab Raaz (1994) in Urdu, Bharay Bharolay (1994) in Punjabi, and the devotional Zikr-e-Habib; his collected verse appeared as Kulyat-e-Wasif Ali Wasif in 2014. He was close to Qudratullah Shahab, Ashfaq Ahmed and Hanif Ramay, and his Lahore home became a meeting place — regular gatherings where seekers put their questions to him, later printed as the Guftugu series in thirty volumes. He died in Lahore on 18 January 1993, aged sixty-four, and lies in the Miani Sahib graveyard; his shrine on Bahawalpur Road, near Chowk Chauburji, draws visitors still, and his death anniversary is marked each year.