Amir Meenai

He was educated at Farangi Mahal, Lucknow's primary educational institute, studying the curriculum books with Mufti Saadullah and the Farangi Mahal scholars ¹². In poetry he was a disciple of Asir Lucknowi, and in 1852 he gained access to the court of Wajid Ali Shah ². The Urdu biography also records a Sufi discipleship: that he took bay'ah, the discipleship oath, from Amir Shah, the sajjada-nashin (hereditary custodian) of the Sabiri Chishti family ². That attestation stands in this one text; no other source read names an affiliation for him, and the English article's mention of "mysticism" is among the subjects of his poetry, not a statement about the man ¹.

In the British attack on Lucknow in 1856 and the rebellion of 1857, the family's homes were destroyed and he fled with his family, first to Kakori, where the poet Mohsin Kakorvi gave them refuge, and then to Rampur, where he found favour at the court of Nawab Yusuf Ali Khan ¹. There he served in the judiciary, was appointed head of Rampur's library, and became the ruler's official poetic mentor (ustad), succeeding Ghalib in that position ¹.

He wrote over forty books in Urdu, Persian and Arabic ¹. His greatest labour was the Urdu dictionary Ameer-ul-Lughaat, of which two volumes had been printed when he died ². In 1900 he travelled to Hyderabad Deccan to seek financial support for the dictionary's publication, and died there on 13 October 1900, barely a month after his arrival; he is buried in Hyderabad ¹.

In poetry he is best known for his ghazals and, above all, for the naat — poems in praise of the Prophet ﷺ Muhammad — a genre he helped popularise in Urdu poetry and of which he is counted a pioneer ¹. Among his books are the divans Miraat-ul-Ghaib and Sanam Khana-i-Ishq, a naat divan, the masnavis Nur-e-Tajalli and Abr-e-Karam, and Subah-e-Azal, on the Prophet's birth ²¹. He was respected by contemporary poets including Ghalib and Dagh Dehlvi, and later by Muhammad Iqbal ¹. His ghazals and naats remain in the repertoires of ghazal and qawwali singers ¹.

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