Muhammad Din Fauq
1877–1945
Biography
Muhammad Din Fauq (1877–1945) was an Urdu poet, critic, journalist and historian, and his lasting fame rests largely on his writing about Kashmir. He was born in 1877 in a village near Sialkot, in the Punjab. He did not go beyond middle school, but he learned journalism as an employee of the Lahore newspaper Paisa Akhbar. In 1901 he started a weekly of his own, Panjah Faulad, which appeared until 1906.
He is often described as a pioneer of journalism in Jammu and Kashmir. He spoke up for Kashmiris at a time when they were not thought suitable for army service, and he worked to change that view. He protested against forced labour and pressed for a land-transfer law and for co-operative societies. In 1908 he helped lead the All India Muslim Kashmiri Conference, founded at Lahore, alongside Muhammad Iqbal. His monthly Kashmiri Magazine, begun in 1906, carried on for almost three decades.
As a historian he published a history of Kashmir in 1910, and later works on the peoples of Kashmir, Jammu and Poonch, written in Urdu. His survey of the families and communities of Kashmir, published in 1936, is valued by anthropologists for the traditions it records. The book on this site, شاہی سیر کشمیر (roughly, a royal tour of Kashmir), is listed under his name. Its title places it squarely in the region that occupied most of his writing life.
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Books
شاہی سیر کشمیر
by محمد الدین فوق
Muhammad Din Fauq recounts the visits of four Mughal emperors to Kashmir. Separate sections follow Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb through the valley and its courtly history.
Summary written by gpt-6-sol.