Sufi Zamin Ali Khan

By Mohsin Atique Khan

An excellent orator and the Imaam of the Eid Gah of Satanpurwa, has a cherished personality and has been leading prayers of Eid and Baqreed at the Eid Gah for almost forty years. He follows the Barelvi sect of Islam and delivers his sermons not only in the Urdu language, but in the local colloquial language also which distinguishes him from others and makes him dear to the public. Born on 2nd February 1940, he completed his primary and then secondary education from Satanpurwa in 1958. Being from an improvished family he settled in Chotai Ka Purwa, a village near Sindurwa in Sultanpur District in 1965, where he would teach and then go to Sirajul Ulum Latifiya, a madrasa in Jagdishpur to learn basic Urdu, Persian and Arabic. He continued his study at this Madrasa till 1975, and then he got enrolled in Darul Ulum Mazhar-e-Haq at Tandah, a town in Faizabad and completed the course of Alimiat and Qiraat in 1977. When he returned from Tandah, he was appointed as a teacher in Sirajul Ulum Latifiya, in Jagdishpur, where he got busy in teaching but kept in touch with the public through speeches and sermons for which he would be invited by the people in the far-flung areas like Bihar, Orissa, Gujrat, Chattisgarh and Mumbai etc. His major concern in the area was to arrange basic Islamic education for children and for that purpose after much consultaion with the people of the area, he successfully aquired an area of 18 bisua land and established a Madrasa near his village Garhi Dilawar in the name of "Madrasa Ashraful Ulum Mohammadiya" in 1967 with the support of Md Jafar, Haji Md. Yusuf, Khushi Mohammad, Md. Ali Munshi, Kallan Khan, and Maulwi Abdul Baari. He was declared the president (Sadar) of the Madrasa, the post he held for long four decades and finally resigned in 2008-9. It is during this time (1970s) when he was honoured with the Imamat of the Eid Gah of Satanpurwa a respectful duty he has been performing till date successfully. Being an Imam, he felt the heat of many illicit and extra marital relationships of the people who would have keep mistresses as a fashion. He took up this concern and met diffirent such people and encouraged them to enter the wed-lock after explaining the teachings of Islam in this regard. He successfully transformed many such relations in to marriages and was instrumental in the clean-up of the society to some extent. In 1999, god bestowed upon him the oppotunity to perform Haj and he went on pilgrimage along with his wife. He kept on his journey of teaching and education in Jagdishpur till 30th June 2007 when he retired after reaching the required age. Among his disciples were Maulana Qubtul Hasan, Maulana Husain, Maulana Aslam, Maulana Zuber, Maulana Juned and Maulana Abdul Moid. (Based on personal interview with him conducted on 21st August 2012) The khans of Satanpurwa: A Historical and Socio-cultural Account, by Mohsin Atique Khan, Page no. 174-175.