T. B. Irving

Ahmed Ali

Ahmed Ali (1910 in New Delhi – 14 January 1994 in Karachi) was a Pakistani novelist, diplomat and scholar, who was responsible for writing arguably the greatest novel ever written about Delhi. Born in Delhi, India, he was involved in progressive literary movements as a young man. Professor Ahmed Ali was born in Delhi in 1910, and educated at Aligarh and Lucknow universities, standing first-class and first in the order of merit in both B.A. (Honours), 1930 and M.A. English, 1931. He taught at leading Indian universities including Lucknow and Allahabad from 1932–46 and joined the Bengal Senior Educational Service as Professor and Head of the English Department at Presidency College, Calcutta (1944–47). Professor Ahmed Ali was also BBC's Representative and Director in India during 1942–44. from China to Karachi in 1948; becoming Director of Foreign Publicity, Government of Pakistan.

Marmaduke Pickthall
Marmaduke Pickthall (1875–May 19, 1936) was a Western Islamic scholar, noted as a poetic translator of the Qur'an into English. A convert from Christianity to Islam, Pickthall was a novelist, esteemed by D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and E. M. Forster, as well as a journalist, headmaster, and political and religious leader. He declared his Islam in dramatic fashion after delivering a talk on ‘Islam and Progress' on November 29, 1917, to the Muslim Literary Society in Notting Hill, West London. He was also involved with the services of the Woking Muslim Mission in the absence of Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, its founder.^[1]

Biography

Marmaduke was born in 1875 to Mary O'Brien and the Reverend Charles Grayson Pickthall, a comfortable middle class English family, whose roots trace back to a knight of William the Conqueror. On the death of his father, when Marmaduke was five, the family moved to London. He was a shy and sickly child, suffering from bronchitis. Educated at Brondesbury, he left after just six terms^[2].