In 1854, Muhammad Hussain graduated from college and began to help his father with his newspaper and publishing work.
Then his world came apart during the next few years due to his father-owned newspaper's support of the rebels against the British empire and restoration of the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar in Delhi temporarily in the aftermath of Indian Rebellion of 1857.
In 1887, he established the Azad Library which helped him earn the title of Shams-ul-ulama (Sun among the Learned).
He declared the aim of poetry to be “as we express it, it should arouse in the listeners’ heart the same effect, the same emotion, the same fervor, as would be created by seeing the thing itself, rejecting the aesthetics of classical Urdu poetry, which, according to him, was artificial and involved in a 'game of words' that did not produce genuine emotion.
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan encouraged and supported both Hali and Azad in their effort to create a simple and realistic-looking creed of Urdu literature.