Mahmud Brelvi

Mahmud Brelvi was a Pakistani Muslim scholar and author, styled Professor, whose books surveyed the Muslims of the modern world. The earliest of them to reach library catalogues, The Muslim Neighbours of Pakistan, appeared from the Ripon Printing Press in 1950, and the catalogues credit him with nineteen works in all, on the history and politics of Pakistan and the Islamic countries.¹² In February 1952 he was appointed by Pakistan's Ministry of Information to assist Hector Bolitho, then in Karachi to write the official biography of Jinnah; Bolitho's letter of 4 February 1952 complains that Professor Brelvi, though scrupulous in his courtesy, had withdrawn from the work after six days.³

By October 1955 he was in Cairo as Head of the Department of Publications of the Islamic Congress (Al-Mo'tamar al-Islami), the pan-Islamic body whose work he surveyed for The Islamic Review, the Woking journal whose contributors page calls him a well-known author of several books on Muslims of today; the same issue printed his study of Ibn Kathir on the Sufi Husain ibn Mansur al-Hallaj.⁴ The library authority records behind his Wikidata item and his Open Library author record agree on a birth year of 1908 — not the 1905 of the queue that named him — and no source anywhere gives his death date (the queue's 1985 is likewise unattested), so the record carries the 1908 birth year and his documented activity from 1950 onwards, and no death date.⁵²