Historical Trivia

Oliver  Goldsmith : (1728-1774) Anglo-Irish poet, novelist and dramatist Oliver Goldsmith was born in Ireland in 1728. He was the son of a Protestant Clergyman. After his education at various schools and Trinity College, Dublin, he failed to settle down to any regular professional career. He studied medicine at Edinburgh and Leyden, but never took a medical degree from either university. Indeed, he appears to have been too irresponsible to fit himself for any regular profession. The combination of his literary work and his dissolute lifestyle led Horace Walpole to give him the name of  " Inspired Idiot ". For sometime during his twenties he rambled the continent leading hand to mouth existence and often, according to the stories he told later , lived on the the alms he was given for playing the flute. At the age of thirty he settled penniless. In London, he tried to earn a living by writing. He did an immense amount of sheer hack-work. As a writer, he had an easy and graceful...

Thomas Campion: (15657-1620) English poet, composer and musician Thomas Campion was born in 1567 in London. He was amazingly versatile English even by poet Elizabethan and musician standards. He was the second child of john and Lucy Campion. His father died when he was 10 years old, though his mother married again but she too passed away soon and left him under the guardianship of his stepfather Augustine Steward. When he was 14, his stepfather sent him and his sister to Cambridge. In1584, he left Cambridge and studied law but was later qualified and practiced as a doctor in London. However, he achieved fame not as a scholar, lawyer or a doctor but as a poet and musician. This was an age when English poetry and music reached their supreme heights. His poems  started gaining publicity around 1591 with five un-ascribed poems which contained ' Astrophel and Stella ' by Sir Philip Sydney. His Second work was published  was in Latin and called ' Thomae Campini Poemata ' whic...

Omar Al-Mukhtar: (1858-1931) " The sentence on you Omar Mukhtar is Death by hanging in Public ."   " From God we come, and unto God, we shall return ". The National hero of Libya, revolutionist and member of the Senusy Omar AL-Mukhtar led a religious organization with administrative and military functions and led the anti-colonial resistance in Cyrenaica from 1923 to 1931 when he was captured by the Italians and condemned to death. He was  called  The Lion of the Desert , known among the Colonial Italians as  Matari of the Monifa. Though his date of birth is uncertain, he was born between 1856 and 1862. He learned Islam at an early age and became Hafiz after which he started to teach the Quran as a scholar till he came to the age of 53, it was the time when his life was about to take a new phase. During the Italian-Turk war in October, an Italian naval regiment arrived at the coast of Libya, then a territory subject which was under the control of Ottoman. Italian th...

Abdul Ghani Khan Baba: (1914-1996) Ghani baba was born in Hashtnagar in Frontier tribal areas of British India (probably now the Charsadda district of  KPK) in 1914. He was the son of Indian independence activist the time of British era, The leader of Awami National Party Abdul Ghaffar khan aka Bacha Khan . His wife Roshan belonged from a Parsi family, daughter of Nawab Rustam Jang. This couple had three children Shanadana and Zareen daughters and son, Faridun. He is widely considered to be the best Pashto poet of the 20th century and stands on a par with Kaushal khan Khattak and Rehman Baba. Apart from that he was politician, philosopher, writer, and artist. He was often praised by the titles of   Lewanay Palaspay  (i.e.: Mad Philosopher) and  Da Ilm Samandar  (i.e. Ocean of Knowledge). In his early age, he went to study art at Rabindranath Tagore's University in Shanti Niketan, where he build interest in painting and sculptures. In 1933 after he came bac...

  Mirza Abul Muzaffar Mohammad Sirajuddin (1775-1862) Bahadur Shah Zafar was the last Mughal emperor of the subcontinent and  the second son of Akbar Shah  II and Lal Bai . , who chose Zafar for a nom de plume; he was born in the red fort of Delhi. He received his early education there in Arabic and Persian, as well as in the arts of combat, and archery. He grew up with a deep interest in poetry, music, spiritualism, and calligraphy. He had a fine hand as a calligrapher and sent copies of his handwritten Quran to the prominent mosques of Delhi as a gift.  He came to the throne at the ripe age of sixty-two only to rule a namesake empire that had lost its power and gl ory and had shrunk to the vicinity of the fort itself. A liberal emperor, who respected all faiths, loved peace and was projected as a supporter of the 1857 uprising, was charged by the British government for treason and his role in a huge rebellion against the British Empire.  With the entry o...

Abu'l Hasan Yamīn ud-Dīn Khusrau: (1253-1325 ) Amir Khusrau or Ab’ul Hasan Yamin ud-Din Khusrau, It is being said that  after suffering the onslaughts of Chengez Khan, his father  Saifuddin , a Turk chieftain, migrated to India during the rule of Shamsuddin Altamsh who presented him a high position in his army. Khusrau was born in  in 1253  Patiali in Etah district of Uttar Pradesh  where his father had settled. When he was just eight years old, his father was killed in an army action after which his mother moved to Delhi to live with his maternal grandfather who was died when he was just twenty years old . Amir Khusrau is considered to be the first poet of Urdu-Hindi . The disciple of the famous Chishti saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya ,  was given the title of " Amir"  by one of his patrons, he had the unique distinction of being a soldier, courtier, Sufi, poet, litterateur, and music maestro. He was veteran   in Persian, Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi an...

Syed Ahmad Shah: (1931-2008) Ahmad Faraz is one of the best poets Pakistan has ever seen.  He acquired the pen name of Faraz, came to be known as Ahmad Faraz as a poet. He was born on  January 12, 1931,  at Nav Shahra though his familial place is Kohat. He studied at Islamia College, Kohat; Edwards College, Peshawar; and Peshawar University from where he got his degrees of M. A. in Urdu and Persian. He began his career as a producer in Radio Pakistan. Lately, he worked as a lecturer at Islamia College in Peshawar. Faraz disapproved of the military dictatorship in Pakistan and expressed himself unreservedly for which he was arrested. On his release, he preferred to live in a self-imposed exile in Europe and Canada for six years. when he came back, he took up senior positions of administrative nature as Resident Director of Pakistan National Centre, and afterward as the Director of Akademy Adabiyat Pakistan, Lok Wirsa, and Chairperson of National Book Foundation. A popularl...