Hakim Mohammed Said

Hakim Mohammed Said was born on January 20, 1920 in Delhi, then part of British India, into a family already known for its work in traditional medicine ^[1]. His father, Hakim Abdul Majeed, had founded the Hamdard Dawakhana in Delhi in 1906, a dispensary devoted to Unani tibb, the Greco-Arabic system of healing practiced across South Asia. The word Hamdard, meaning companion in pain, would define the rest of his life.

Said lost his father in early childhood, and the family business passed into the care of his mother, Rabia Begum, and later his elder brother, Hakim Abdul Hameed ^[1]. The boy grew up between the pharmacy counter and the classroom, memorizing the properties of herbs while completing a conventional education. He trained formally as a hakim, a practitioner of Unani medicine, and by his early twenties was seeing patients and helping manage the Delhi dispensary ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Hakim Mohammed Said finds the answer rooted in this apprenticeship. The Delhi years gave him two convictions he never abandoned: that traditional medicine deserved scientific study rather than dismissal, and that a medical business should serve the public rather than enrich its owners ^[2].

The partition of India in 1947 divided the family enterprise along with the subcontinent. In January 1948, Said left Delhi for the new state of Pakistan, arriving in Karachi with little capital while his brother Abdul Hameed remained in India to run the original Hamdard ^[3]. That June he opened a modest clinic in a rented space in the old city, treating patients by day and preparing medicines by night.

The venture grew quickly. Hamdard Pakistan began manufacturing herbal preparations, most famously Rooh Afza, the rose colored summer drink his father had formulated in Delhi decades earlier ^[3]. Demand across the new country turned the small dispensary into a national concern within a decade. Said, however, refused to treat the growing company as personal property. In 1953 he converted the entire enterprise into a waqf, an Islamic charitable trust, dedicating its profits permanently to education, research, and public welfare ^[4].

The decision set the pattern for everything that followed. Hamdard's commercial success became the engine of a philanthropic program that few private institutions in Pakistan have matched. Any serious Hakim Mohammed Said biography turns on this act of renunciation: a businessman at the height of expansion signing away ownership of his own creation ^[4].

Said's ambitions reached well beyond medicine. He edited the health magazine Hamdard-e-Sehat and in 1953 launched Hamdard Naunehal, a children's monthly that introduced generations of young Pakistanis to reading in Urdu ^[5]. He also founded Hamdard Medicus, a research journal on Eastern medicine, and wrote, edited, or translated a very large body of books on medicine, Islamic history, travel, and the history of science ^[5].

His largest project took physical form on the outskirts of Karachi. Beginning in the 1980s, Said developed Madinat al-Hikmah, the City of Knowledge, a purpose built campus containing schools, research institutes, and the Bait al-Hikmah library, one of the largest private libraries in Pakistan ^[6]. In 1991 the site became home to Hamdard University, chartered as a private university offering degrees in medicine, pharmacy, engineering, law, and management ^[6].

He convened intellectual life as energetically as he built it. Through the Hamdard Foundation he ran the Shura Hamdard, a standing forum where scholars, judges, and journalists debated national questions, and the Naunehal Assembly, gatherings at which schoolchildren questioned public figures directly ^[7]. Among the most cited Hakim Mohammed Said facts is his personal routine: he took no salary from Hamdard, drew a nominal fee from patients, and continued clinical practice into his final week.

Public office came late and briefly. In 1993 Said was appointed governor of Sindh Province, accepting the largely ceremonial post on his own austere terms ^[8]. He declined the salary attached to the office and continued to hold his morning clinic, a gesture consistent with a lifetime of refusing personal gain from public trust.

His tenure lasted only months, ending in 1994 amid the shifting federal politics of the period, yet it fixed his reputation as an incorruptible figure in an era when Karachi's public life was marked by violence and factional conflict ^[8]. He returned to Hamdard and to his writing without apparent regret, remarking often that his real constituency was the sick and the young.

The episode matters in assessing Hakim Mohammed Said achievements because it showed the breadth of his standing. Few private citizens in Pakistan commanded enough cross party respect to be offered a governorship, and fewer still treated it as an interruption of more important work ^[2].

On the morning of October 17, 1998, gunmen shot Said as he arrived at his clinic in the Aram Bagh area of Karachi for his customary early appointments. He died at the scene at the age of 78 ^[9]. The killing of a man widely regarded as above the city's political feuds provoked national grief and an immediate political crisis.

The federal government responded within days by imposing governor's rule in Sindh, dismissing the provincial administration, and launching a sweeping crackdown in Karachi ^[9]. Prosecutors charged a group of activists linked to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement; convictions handed down by an anti terrorism court in 1999 were later overturned on appeal, and the case has never been conclusively resolved ^[10].

Pakistan honored him in death. He was buried at Madinat al-Hikmah, the campus he had built, and was posthumously celebrated as Shaheed-e-Pakistan, martyr of Pakistan, with commemorations held each October ^[7].

Said married Naimat Begum, and the couple had one daughter, Sadia Rashid, who succeeded him as president of the Hamdard Foundation Pakistan and later as chancellor of Hamdard University ^[7]. Those who worked with him describe a man of fixed habits: rising before dawn, answering letters in his own hand, and keeping the same spare office for decades. He received national honors for his services to medicine and literature, including the Sitara-i-Imtiaz ^[5].

His institutions outlived him intact, which was precisely the point of the waqf he created in 1953. Hamdard Laboratories continues to fund the foundation's schools, clinics, scholarships, and publishing, while Hamdard University enrolls thousands of students on the campus he planned ^[6]. Hamdard Naunehal still appears monthly, more than seventy years after its first issue.

Historians of South Asian medicine credit Said with giving Unani tibb a modern institutional footing: research journals, international conferences, and formal degree programs where previously there had been only apprenticeship ^[2]. His larger legacy is harder to measure but easy to state. In a country often short of trusted public figures, he demonstrated that private wealth could be turned wholly to public purpose, and Pakistanis of every background still invoke his name as a standard of integrity ^[10].