ATTRIBUTING literary works or religious texts to an author other than the real one is known as pseudepigraphy. According to Concise Oxford English Dictionary, ‘pseudepigrapha’ are “spurious or pseudonymous writings, especially Jewish writings ascribed to various biblical patriarchs and prophets”, which were in fact composed between circa 200BC and 200AD.
The term, basically used in literary criticism, or textual criticism, to be precise, comes from the Greek ‘pseudo’ meaning ‘false’ and another Greek term ‘epigraphe’ meaning ‘to write on’ or ‘ascribe’. ‘Epigraph’ means the inscription on a building or the wording describing the theme of a book or a chapter of a book. Thus pseudepigraphy means the false attribution of a book or text to an author or false ascription of name of an author to a text.
Incorrect or spurious ascription of authorship is not something new in Urdu, Persian or Arabic literature either. In Urdu, Hafiz Mahmood Sherani, the renowned scholar of Urdu and Persian, wrote many pieces on the literary works whose real author is not the one falsely believed to be the author. One such work is the divan attributed to Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti Ajmeri, one of the most revered Sufi saints of the Indo-Pak subcontinent. Sherani in his scholarly article published in July 1924 issue of Urdu, the research journal edited by none other than Maulvi Abdul Haq and published by Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu, proved with intrinsic and extrinsic evidences that the divan ascribed to Hazrat Khwaja Moinuddin is actually the work of a namesake, Maulana Moinuddin Al-Farahi, the famous scholar, ‘waaiz’ (sermoniser) and the author of the famous book Ma’arij-un-nabuwwat.
Sherani’s disciple Prof Mohammad Ibrahim Dar further researched the issue and wrote an article confirming, with new proofs, that Sherani’s proposition was absolutely correct and the said divan was penned by Maulana Moinuddin Farahi. This article, published in July 1950 issue of Urdu, and 20 more scholarly articles, both in Urdu and English, have been compiled now and published by Lahore’s Majlis-i-Taraqqi-i-Adab (MTA).
Edited and annotated by Afzal Haq Qarshi under the title Mazaameen-i-Dar, the book has some added value as it has some newly discovered articles of Prof Dar as well as annotations. Also, utmost care has been taken in proofreading as the previous editions, one of them published from India in 2014, has some errors that have distorted some of the text. These errors have been taken care of in this edition.
In his intro to the book Prof Dr Tehseen Firaqi, the director general of MTA, has correctly mentioned that Prof Dar was a true successor of Hafiz Mahmood Sherani as he, just like his mentor, had the profound knowledge of Arabic, Persian and Urdu literatures as well as the keen eye to see beneath the surface and sift the truth. Dar was, says Firaqi, as courageous and iconoclastic as Sherani and both were myth-busters. Together they removed many misconceptions about our classical literatures and oriental languages.
In his preface Afzal Haq Qarshi has given a brief life sketch of Prof Dar. According to him, Prof Dar was born in 1902 in Amritsar. Dar did his BA from Islamia College, Lahore, and his MA in Arabic from the same college in 1925. For some time he worked as cataloguer of Arabic manuscripts in Punjab University Library.
In 1931, he was appointed as the lecturer in Persian at Gujarat College, Ahmadabad. Here Dar developed a real interest in the language and culture of Gujarat and researched some rare manuscripts on the old form of the Urdu language used in Gujarat and which was often called Gujari or Gojari Urdu. He was later transferred to Ismail Yusuf College, Bombay (now Mumbai).
A reminiscent of the long years that Dar spent in Ahmadabad and Gujarat is his research work on Gujarat’s literary and cultural activities and the development of the local dialect of the Urdu language in Gujarat as well as the earliest known written samples of Urdu literature found in Deccan and Gujarat. Some of Prof Dar’s English articles elaborating Gujarat’s contribution towards Urdu and Gojari and cultural and literary activities under the Sultans of Gujarat have been included in the book.
Prof Mohammad Ibrahim Dar lived but a short life and when he died in Bombay on May 17, 1953, he was only 51. Had he lived longer, perhaps we would have had many new literary discoveries and many more literary myths would have been busted.
Published in Dawn, May 16th, 2017
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.