About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of forty-seven poems by Ameer Ahmad Ameer Minai of Lucknow and Rampur (1829–1900): forty-three *ghazals* (lyric poems) and four *naats* (poems in praise of the Prophet). They are all the poems by Ameer Minai on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Ameer Minai ka Kalam* ("Poems of Ameer Minai"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the forty-seven pages listed under the author, downloaded in October 2026. The source pages carry no modern editorial matter. Where a reading is obscure, the translation gives the most likely sense and says so in a note.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing has been left out. The poems are given in the order of the source, which is broadly alphabetical by first line, and are headed by their first line; the four *naats* are headed as such. In one ghazal ("Ever since I pictured that face full of light") the source gives the same couplet twice; it is printed twice, as found, and translated the same way both times.

Copyright: Ameer Minai died in 1900, so his poems are in the public domain everywhere. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]. The translation keeps each line of verse as a line, and puts accuracy before rhyme. The pen name Ameer is kept as a name.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Lucknow, Medina, Mecca, Sinai; Joseph, Jesus, Moses, Noah, Solomon, Khizr, Azar; Laila, Qais; Ali, Hasan, Husain; Uwais al-Qarani, Mansur al-Hallaj.

Introduction

Ameer Ahmad, who wrote as Ameer, was born in Lucknow in 1829 into a family descended from the Lucknow saint Shah Mina, from whom the name "Minai" comes. He studied poetry under Muzaffar Ali Asir and found a place at the court of Wajid Ali Shah, the last king of Awadh. When Lucknow fell in 1857 his house was ruined, and he went to Rampur, where he served the Nawabs, above all Kalb-e-Ali Khan, for some forty years. In his last year he was invited to Hyderabad by the Nizam; he reached the city in 1900 and died there a few weeks later.

Ameer was a scholar as well as a poet. He began a great dictionary of Urdu, *Ameer-ul-Lughat*, of which two volumes appeared in his lifetime, and he trained many pupils, among them Jalil Manikpuri. He was the friendly rival of Dagh, who also served at Rampur and later at Hyderabad; the two were the leading masters of the ghazal at the end of the nineteenth century. Besides his collections of ghazals he wrote much religious verse, and his poems in praise of the Prophet were gathered as *Mehamid-e-Khatam-un-Nabiyyin*.

The poems here show both sides of him. The four *naats* ask the Prophet's intercession for sinners and dwell on the Night of Ascent and the city of Medina. The ghazals keep the polish and wit of the Lucknow school, with refrains such as "slowly, slowly", "we too are", "the answer" and "*mashallah*", but they are lighter and more conversational than Nasikh's, and often turn the lover's complaint into a joke. Among them is his most famous ghazal, "The veil keeps slipping from her face, slowly, slowly".