The bright star of Urdu journalism Asif Jilani passed away

The bright star of the world of Urdu journalism and broadcasting has drowned.

The news of the death of Asif Jilani, the shining star of Urdu journalism and the person who gave him confidence and dignity, of BBC Urdu Service, made us very sad.

He left behind a wide circle of friends and a large family to be mourned and mourned before Allah Almighty.

May Allah Almighty fill his grave with light and remove his mistakes and shortcomings.

With his death, we have lost a best friend and compassionate brother. His death is also a great loss to the journalism community of Pakistan.

We read the news of his death on Monday morning on the Facebook page of our friend Atta Muhammad Tabasim, but we did not believe it. Could not be verified.

We called our classmate in London and ex-editor of Daily Jang London brother Zahoor Niazi and BBC’s Kashif Qamar and Jafar Rizvi several times but could not contact them. There was no answer either.

On Tuesday, April 4, a post by Mr. Raza Ali Abidi of BBC on Facebook confirmed the death of our dear friend Asif Jilani.

Raza Ali Abidibhai has paid tribute to his Urdu journalism and his services in BBC Urdu service in wonderful words.

Mr. Asif Jilani lived a full life as one of the most successful journalists and broadcasters.

He was the best correspondent, popular columnist, editor of two newspapers, Daily Jang London and Daily Millat, and gained fame as a renowned broadcaster in broadcasting organizations like BBC. As an active and active journalist, he was Pakistan’s senior-most journalist and global city broadcast and columnist.

He chose the profession of journalism at a very young age and as long as he had the ability to write, he continued to write columns on Pakistan, the Muslim Ummah and the global situation, which were published in newspapers of Pakistan and India and on various news websites of social media. Keep happening.

He had a keen eye on domestic politics and the situation of Islamic countries and the conflict between major powers and used to present a balanced analysis on it.

He started his journalism in 1954 at the age of 18 with daily Imrooz, proved his skills in short news writing, reporting and essay writing in every field of journalism and made his name in journalistic circles.

The owner and editor-in-chief of daily Jang, Mir Khalilur Rahman, was a great expert in the field of journalism, who was always looking for good and worthy sub-editors and reporters for his newspaper and one by one talented and worthy journalists in the journalistic galaxy of his newspaper. They were constantly collecting. Mir Sahib used to provide them with an opportunity to test their skills by including them in the organization of war.

During this search, his eyes fell on Asif Jilani, and he brought him into the war. At that time, Syed Muhammad Taqi, Raees Amrohavi, Inam Nabi Pardesi Yusuf Siddiqui, Inam Aziz, Athar Ali, Ustad Nazish Haidari and Irshad Ahmad Chaghatai and others like The budding journalists and editors were already there. His arrival in the war added another bright star to the galaxy of war journalists and made them shine even more. Benefited from

During the martial law period of Ayub Khan in Pakistan in October 1958, Mr. Mir Khalilur Rahman felt that the representation of the newspaper in the neighboring country of India was the need of the hour, so he appointed Asif Jilani as the representative of Pakistan in New Delhi in 1959.

It was a great honor for any journalist that 23-year-old Asif Jilani got. Mir Sahib also chose him because Asif Jilani’s family was in Delhi before partition and he was educated in Jamia Millia Delhi. He was familiar with the city of Delhi.

He did the right to represent a major newspaper like Jang in New Delhi, the capital of the enemy country. His correspondence with Delhi and his special news of that time were awaited and he was interested in the relations between Pakistan and India and India. It was a great source of information about the conditions of the Muslims. They had to face difficulties in performing their duties and also had to eat the atmosphere of prison.

When the war broke out between Pakistan and India in September 1965, he was arrested and stayed for a month in the same jail in Tihar where martyrs Kashmir Maqbool Butt and Afzal Guru on February 9, 2013 were martyred in the struggle for the freedom of Kashmir. He was hanged for the crime. According to him, in this prison he had to serve all the classes like Kasuri mill labor, class C and B.

His release at the end of the war as a result of the Tashkent Agreement resulted in an exchange of journalists and he came to Pakistan and a few months later went to London as a post-war correspondent.

Meanwhile, he joined the BBC Urdu Service on 1st December 1965 and started working as a newscaster. To be employed in this position in an international media organization like the BBC was considered a great honor in those days. He used to present news at the BBC as well as its popular current affairs program Sir Bean. Here too, like his illustrious journalistic career, he created the magic of sound with his program in a new electronic medium.

His program was very popular and was regularly listened to by the Urdu community in Pakistan and India as well as in India and Pakistan. There were international broadcasting organizations like Urdu Service. He was associated with this organization for years and continued to share his knowledge and experience.

In 1973, Mir Khalil once hired him and made him the editor of Jang London where he served for 10 years. And continued to write columns on current affairs.

Even after his retirement from newspaper and BBC jobs, he did not give up writing and continued to write regular columns.

He used to post his columns on Facebook as well. His last column on Facebook is dated 7th January 2022 which was published in daily Jasarat. It was titled “Selection Ki Bhol Bhaliya Mein Kho Hi Gaya Karvaan Apna” What a beautiful title. The column he wrote was on January 7, 2022, but how relevant is it to the current situation in Pakistan?

Our loving relationship with him was established in 1980 but his absent introduction as a major journalist was from 1970 and read his letters in Delhi and news during the war. It happened because of Islamic Makkah, which was organizing a large conference of journalists with Islamic tendencies from Islamic countries in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

The contact had invited us from Pakistan and given us the authority to make four more journalists from Pakistan as part of our delegation. The Executive Editor of Daily Jang, Syed Mahmood Ahmad Ahmad Madani and Asif Jilani from the UK were included. The conference was held in Jakarta and inaugurated by President General Suharto.

The conference lasted for two days and after that all five of us visited Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia and we had the opportunity to spend a month together. During the trip, we had the precious moments of learning and spending time with these four great journalists and leaders of the journalism community.

Wherever we went on this journey, the journalist and reporter inside Asif Jilani was always on the lookout for news and every day he sent some news to his newspaper in London.

It is said that if you want to know a person, you should travel with him or do business with him. Found caring and having great qualities. As we were the youngest. So everyone cared more about us and every one of them seniors kept asking about our needs.

Asif Jilani belonged to a great scholarly family of the subcontinent. Both father and mother were educated from Aligarh and were professors at Jamia Millia Delhi.

Asif Jilani’s father was a famous Sindhi scholar, writer and writer Abdul Wahid Sindhi. He belonged to Panu Aqil Sindh. He was fond of reading and writing since childhood. There were no resources for

His parents also passed away. By chance he got an opportunity to go to Delhi and he went to Jamia Millia Delhi and there he was educated and brought up under the guidance of Dr. Zakir Hussain and then after completing his higher education, he started teaching. He joined the profession and started teaching in his mother’s school. He had a great passion for writing.

He started writing in various magazines and journals, he used to write mostly about children and wrote many books for children on their education and training.

He got married there in the Jilani family. Asif Jilani was born in Delhi in 1936 and his education and training was done in the same academic family and in the company of great scholars and academicians in a big university of Delhi, Jamia Millia.

Refreshing his memories, he writes in one place that “I opened my eyes in Jamia Millia Islamia, a Muslim nationalist educational institution where both my father and mother were involved in teaching.”

I consider myself very fortunate to have been brought up in an institution that was blessed with the galaxy of distinguished academics and intellectuals like Dr. Zakir Hussain, Dr. Muhammad Mujeeb, Dr. Abid Hussain, Maulana Aslam Jiraj Puri and Kailat Sahib.

According to him, when Pakistan was formed, he was in the seventh grade and his age was 11 years. In this sense, his year of birth was 1936 and his age at the time of his death was 87 years.

Asif Jilani’s wife Mohsina Jilani is also a famous poet and writer. She is also the author of many books.

Two books of Asif Jilani have been published which are named “Wast Asia, Nai Azadi, Nai Taqaze” and “Saghar Sheshes Lal wa Gahar”. If collected, his columns and writings can be dozens of collections.