Samiruddin Qasmi ke Halaat

On the name at the head of it. The piece is signed Sājid ghafara lahu. He has said that the writing is his own, that it appears under another name, and that although he had meant to extend it, it can go up as it stands. It is published here as it stands.

What makes it worth reading is not the praise in the opening paragraph but how carefully it marks the edges of what it knows. Two examples, both on its second page:

• On his year of birth, 6 November 1950 and 25 Muḥarram 1370, it says plainly: this date is not researched, because writing down dates was not the custom in the house. It is, however, approximately the date, and it is what was entered on his certificates and his passport.
• On his lineage, Samiruddin, son of Jamāluddīn, son of Muhammad Bakhsh known as Ladnī, son of Chulhai, of the Shaikh Ṣiddīqī people, whose line meets Ḥaḍrat Abū Bakr Ṣiddīq far back, it says: there is no formal genealogical tree; this is what is well known in the family.

That habit is why the page is useful rather than decorative, and it is the same habit the books have.

The account of the place is unadorned in the same way. He was born at Ghuṭṭī, thāna Mahgāwān, district Godda, in what was then Bihar and is now Jharkhand, a village thirty-six kilometres from the town of Godda, of which it notes that even now there is neither electricity nor a water supply. His first schooling was in the village maktab, with Mawlawī ʿAbd al-Raʾūf known as Gonī, where he read Urdu, Hindi, arithmetic and Persian, before the madrasas and then Deoband.

The site’s own About page is drawn from the same facts, and a bibliography of the works is Samiruddin Qasmi ki Tasanif.