About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of three essays by Abdul Halim Sharar (1860–1926) of Lucknow: "Delhi That Was" (*Dehli Marhoom*), a picture of Delhi and its court under Sultan Muhammad Tughluq, drawn from the travels of Ibn Battuta; "The Gallants of Europe" (*Europe ke Banke*), a history of the Knights Templars from their founding to their destruction; and "The Garden of Desire" (*Bagh-e-Arzu*), a short allegory on hope and longing. The title, *Sharar ke Mazameen* ("Sharar's Essays"), has been given to this collection by the present edition; it is not the title of a book published by the author.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the pages دہلی مرحوم، یورپ کے بانکے and باغ آرزو, downloaded in October 2026. Wikisource notes that "The Gallants of Europe" was written in instalments for Sharar's monthly magazine *Dilgudaz* in 1914, and the essay itself refers to the *Dilgudaz* of November 1914. No dates or first printings are given for the other two essays. No scan of an early printing has been found on archive.org.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing of the author's text has been left out. The short summaries that Wikisource prints at the head of the essays are modern editorial matter and are not given here. In "Delhi That Was" the author's section title, "Delhi and Its Former Court", is kept as a heading. Obvious misprints have been read in the sense the context requires, and doubtful dates and names are kept as printed, with a translator's note.

Copyright: Sharar died in 1926, so his work is in the public domain in Pakistan and India. All three essays were published in his lifetime and therefore before 1931, so no United States check is needed. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …].

Sharar dates some events by the "Muhammadi" era, which he counts from the birth of the Prophet (571 CE); these years are kept as printed, with his own Christian-era equivalents. Names are spelled in one way throughout: Delhi, Ibn Battuta, Sultan Muhammad Tughluq, Ghiyas-ud-Din Tughluq, Qutb-ud-Din, Iltutmish, Siri, Tughluqabad, Jahanpanah, Hazar Sutun, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan; the Templars, Hugues de Payens, Jacques de Molay, Philip IV, Clement V, Boniface VIII, Edward II, Acre, Paris, Toulon, Chinon, Vienne.

Introduction

Abdul Halim Sharar was born in Lucknow in 1860 and spent part of his boyhood at Matiya Burj near Calcutta, where the deposed king of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, kept his court in exile. He became one of the busiest writers of his age: a journalist and editor, the founder in 1887 of the monthly *Dilgudaz*, the author of more than twenty historical novels such as *Firdaus-e-Bareen*, and of the essays on old Lucknow collected as *Guzishta Lakhnau*. Most of his work first appeared in *Dilgudaz*, where history, fiction and moral essays sat side by side. He died in Lucknow in 1926.

The three essays here show that range. "Delhi That Was" begins with a complaint: Damascus and Baghdad had their great city histories, but Delhi, apart from Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan's *Asar-us-Sanadid*, had none. To show what the city was before the Mughals, Sharar retells the account of the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who served Sultan Muhammad Tughluq in the 1330s: the four cities that made up Delhi, the Jama Masjid and the Qutb Minar, the great tanks, the saints' tombs, and then, in a second part, the gates of the palace, the Hall of a Thousand Pillars, the ranks of the court, the giving of gifts and the Eid procession.

"The Gallants of Europe" was written as a companion to Sharar's essays on the *banke*, the swaggering swordsmen of India. It traces knighthood from the Germans and Romans to the Crusades, then tells the story of the Knights Templars: their founding to guard pilgrims to Jerusalem, their rules of life, their wealth and power, and their fall under Philip IV of France and Pope Clement V, with the arrests of 1307, the trials and the burnings. Sharar writes as a Muslim reading European history, and he ends with a bold suggestion: that the Templars' alleged heresies were in part a turn, learned from living beside Muslims, towards a stricter belief in one God.

"The Garden of Desire" is a short prose allegory in the manner of the moral essays of the time. A garden of flowers that always seems one step away, a mother carrying her dying child towards a physician who never comes nearer, and the course of a life from childhood hope to old age become a lesson: look at the garden of desire from a distance, and do the work you were sent into the world to do.