Muhammad Saleh Kamboh

Muhammad Saleh Kamboh Lahori was a Punjabi calligrapher and the official biographer of the emperor Shah Jahan ^{1 2}. His Amal-i Salih, or Shah Jahan Nama, completed in 1659–1660, is one of the most important original sources for Shah Jahan's reign ¹. His death date is uncertain; S. M. Latif gives AH 1085 (1675 CE) on unspecified authority ¹.

He was the son of Mir Abdullah Mushkin Qalam, himself a famous calligrapher, and is believed to have been the younger brother of Inayat Allah Kamboh ¹. He worked as a Shahi Dewan with the governor of Lahore and held the rank of Sipahsalar ¹. The Amal-i Salih covers not only Shah Jahan's life and reign but his predecessors Akbar and Jahangir and a compendium of biographies of the shaikhs, poets and notables of the age ^{1 3}. He was also a poet, by the Persian pen name Kashfi and the Arabic Subhan, and is stated to have been an accomplished singer ¹.

In 1646 he replaced Abd al-Rashid Daylami as chief librarian of the imperial library, before being replaced in turn in 1651–1652 ¹. Under Aurangzeb he served as the emperor's spiritual teacher, having been one of his childhood teachers, and was appointed peshdast, deputy to the Sadr-us-sudur; the mansab lists record him as a commander of five hundred ^{1 2}. The story that he died as an admiral fighting the Ahoms at Pandu in 1636 is rejected by the articles themselves, since he completed his history in 1659–1660 ¹. He is buried in Lahore, where the Saleh Kamboh Mosque stands at Mochi Gate in the Walled City, though the location of his grave is disputed ^{1 3}.