Syed Maratib Ali

Syed Maratib Ali (1882–1961) was a Lahore businessman and contractor whose firm supplied regiments of the British Indian Army, and the father of three of Pakistan's best-known public figures: Syed Amjad Ali, its finance minister and ambassador; Syed Wajid Ali, an industrialist and pioneer of its television; and Syed Babar Ali, founder of the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He has no Wikipedia article of his own in any language and no Wikidata item; this account is written from the English articles on his three sons and from the official website of Babar Ali's autobiography, which alone gives his years. ^{1 2 3}

His sons' articles describe the business he headed. Babar Ali's article says his father owned shops in the Walled City of Lahore and was a top contractor of the British Indian Army, supplying the regiments with logistics and all sorts of items used in them, and that the money earned was used to invest in land. The autobiography website describes the same work as a family-owned provisions store for individual regiments of the British Army. Amjad Ali's article names the firm A. & M. Wazir Ali, which included a Ford Motor Company assembly plant in Karachi, and says Maratib Ali had social and political connections across the Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and British communities in the final days of British rule. ^{1 3 4}

The English article on Mitchell's, the fruit company, records that in 1958 Francis Mitchell sold a majority of his shares to Syed Maratib. The article itself marks that statement as needing a citation, so it is recorded here as a reported lead, not as an established fact. ⁵

He was married to Syeda Mubarik Begum (1888–1969), a daughter of Faqir Syed Iftikharuddin of the Indian Political Service, and they had ten children, four sons and six daughters. Amjad Ali's article calls him the eldest son; Wajid Ali's article, citing Claude Markovits's history of Indian business in the colonial era, calls Wajid the second son. ^{3 4 2}

His own school of Islam is not recorded in any consulted source. The single religious statement in the material is in Babar Ali's article, which says of the family, on the authority of a 2018 Pakistan Today profile, that "His family practices Shia Islam". That is a statement about the family's practice, and it is preserved here as such; it does not name Maratib Ali's own affiliation, and no second source attests one. ¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.