Hakim Muhammad Said

He was born at Delhi into an educated and religious Urdu-speaking Muhajir family whose ancestors had come from Kashgar and whose family had run the Hamdard herbal-medicine business in India before 1947; he was the younger brother of Hakim Abdul Hameed. At his local school he learned Arabic, Persian, Urdu and English and studied the Qur'an. He took a B.Pharmacy and a BSc in medicinal chemistry at the University of Delhi in 1942 and a master's in pharmacy in 1945, joined Hamdard as a junior researcher, and was involved in the Pakistan Movement before 1947. After independence he left Delhi with his wife and daughter and settled in Karachi; in 1952 Ankara University awarded him a PhD in pharmacy. ^{1 2}

He established the Hamdard Laboratories at Karachi in 1948 and directed them until his death; its herbal products became household names across Pakistan. He taught pharmacy at the University of Sindh from 1953 to 1963, and his public campaign against the official dismissal of Eastern medicine as quackery pushed the Ayub Khan government to pass a law legalising it. In 1985 he founded Hamdard University, serving as its first vice-chancellor, and built the Madinat-al-Hikmah campus at Karachi, whose Bait-al-Hikmah library became one of Pakistan's largest. He wrote, edited or compiled over 200 books and journals in Urdu and English on Islam, education, Pakistan, science, medicine and health, founded and edited the journals Hamdard Islamicus and Hamdard Medicus and the children's magazine Hamdard Naunehal, and worked to have alternative medicine recognised by the World Health Organization. ^{1 3}

He served as governor of Sindh Province from 19 July 1993 to 23 January 1994. On 17 October 1998 he was assassinated by unknown assailants at Aram Bagh, Karachi, on his way to a medical experiment at the Hamdard Laboratories; his killing prompted the federal government to impose direct rule over Sindh. The men accused of the murder were acquitted, a verdict the Supreme Court upheld in 2014. He was awarded the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 1966 and, posthumously, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz in 2002. ^{1 3}

His faith is recorded as unknown, and the case is flagged. The sources describe a religious family ("educated and religious"), a schoolboy's study of the Qur'an, a large body of writing on Islam and the editorship of an Islamic-studies journal — his formation and his scholarship, neither of which is an attestation of a personal school affiliation. No text names one, and his Wikidata item carries no religion value at all. A public Muslim scholarly identity is not in doubt; a school is simply never stated, and the museum records only what two sources state. ^{1 2 4}

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