[1] But in his later years, through personal experiences, geopolitical changes and the influence of authors like René Guénon, and traditional scholars of India towards more latter part of his life, like Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanwi,[2] he became a notable critic of the West and proponent of Islamic culture and ideology.
[3][4] Muhammad Hasan Askari was born on 5 November 1919 in a village in Bulandshahr, in western Uttar Pradesh, British India, to a "traditional, middle-class" Muslim family, in a cultured milieu where youngsters used to read the Qur'an as well as classics of Persian literature like Hafez and Saadi.
[8] For years, he struggled to find a permanent job in Delhi, and as per his brother that might have pushed him to move to the newly formed state of Pakistan[9] but the decisive factor was the civil strife and riots which followed the Partition, and in October 1947, he reached Lahore all alone, asking his mother and siblings to also abandon Meerut.
The 1200-odd pages collection of essays also show that during his last years he became disillusioned with Pakistan, thinking it didn't led to the cultural renaissance centred around Urdu he expected, even if he kept his strong opinions about religion, philosophy and politics.
[22] He blamed the absorption of Western philosophy and thinking by Indian Muslims for downgrading poetry to sentimentalism, and wanted to go back to the Islamic sources and Sufi aesthetics, congratulating the works of the Deobandi scholar Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanwi on the Qur'an and Rumi as representative of this brand of poetics.
Politically, he has been described as proposing some sort of Islamic socialism, a "self-sufficient Pakistan where Muslims would lead a life enriched with principles of democracy", and was in favour of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and naturally a harsh critic of Zia-ul-Haq.