My last meeting with C.M. Naim (or Naim Sahib, as we referred to him, no matter our age) was in late May 2025 in Chicago. He welcomed me to Apt 2F and spoke to me about 1) President Obama’s Presidential Library and the dismantling of everglades nearby (you could see the tall structure from his window), 2) the publishing scene in India, then Pakistan, 3) my recent book (briefly) which he commended me for not being full of jargon, 4) an “extraordinary” novel he had just finished – The Return of Faraz Ali by Aamina Ahmad – and, 5) the state of the manuscript he was finishing up. He was a bit slowed down but these topics and themes (US politics, Urdu, literature, his current research) could be the synopsis of any conversation I had had with him since I first met him in the spring of 1998. At the end of the visit, he led me to his book shelf and handed me a series of books with the advice (stern) that I must write on them: Munshi Ihtesamuddin’s Shagrufnama-e Vilayat, Maulvi Syed Mazhar Ali Sandelvi’s Roznamcha and some texts by the late Syed Hasan Askari (someone he has been telling me to write on for many years). Suitably instructed, I left his house feeling full of his wisdom, his admonishment, and his love. Again, a typical experience.My first class with Naim Sahib was in 1998. We read Persian and Urdu tazkirah and malfuzat. We read under his stern eye, his exacting pronunciation, his exquisite grasp of Persian, Urdu, Arabic etymologies. Yet, we read for the culture, the social, the gender-relations, the power that seeped into the text from its margins – the salutations, the encomiums, the repetitive anecdotes that diverged just by a word or a simple setting. Often a three-hour class would be spent just on a passage. I think I irritated him with my final paper (I wrote an imagined tazkirah set in the South Side of Chicago), but he gave me an A.Naim Sahib retired from the South Asian Languages and Civilizations department in 2001. He had joined the department in 1961, at a time when “Area Studies” was just launching. He was part of a new set of hires, alongside Edward C. Dimock, Jr. (Bangla), Colin Masica (Hindi), A.K. Ramanujan (Tamil) and others. Naim Sahib had already published An Urdu Reader with John Gumperz (while at UC Berkeley) and he would follow that up with his Introductory Urdu course in 1965. He also recorded the audio material for that course and his sharp diction can still be heard by students. This short note in his introduction sums up his exacting standards: “This book is not for self-instruction; it has to be studied with a regular instructor. Not just any ‘native-speaker’ would do. Nor does this book allow for a lazy separation of tasks between a linguist and an informant-assistant—the same teacher must be present in the class all the time. This book does not replace the teacher; it merely provides him/her with most of the necessary tools.” Yet the phrase ‘a linguist and an informant-assistant’ draw our attention to the racial and educational hierarchies of mid-to-late twentieth century US.Naim Sahib represents both the worldliness of Urdu and the extreme precarity of its existence. The work he did to bring Urdu to the world is widely-recognized and well-documented. He founded Mahfil in 1963 (later, the Journal of South Asian Literature), then founded Journal of Urdu Studies (1981), translated Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1971), Ghalib (1970), Mir Taqi Mir (1999), Qurratulain Hyder (1999), Deputy Nazir Ahmad (2003) and Muhammadi Begum (2022). Beyond his translation work, was his deep commitment to the social and the political. His essays examined queer life in Urdu poetry (‘The Theme of Homosexual (Pederastic) Love in Pre-modern Urdu Poetry’ from 1979 and ‘Transvestic Words? The Rekhti in Urdu’ from 2001) and Muslim life in US (‘The Outrage of Bernard Lewis’ from 1992 and ‘A Clash of Fanaticisms’ from 2006). Other writers and thinkers will undoubtedly say more about the recent losses to the intellectual life of Urdu scholarship that Naim Sahib’s passing puts into a critical stage – some of them are: Muhammad Umar Memon (1939-2018), Muhammad Umar Memon (1939-2018), Shamsur Rahman Faruqi (1935-2020), Mazhar Mahmood Shairani (1935-2020), and Gopi Chand Narang (1931-2022).As a historian, I did not spend much time reading literature or criticism so my days, and evenings, with Naim Sahib were taken up by his love of two other things: what he termed “polemics” and “Hindustaniyat.” In the introduction to Ambiguities of Heritage: Fictions and Polemics (City Press, 1999), he writes that the polemics “are usually cluttered with ‘facts’ giving them an aura of being more real” and that they “had a kind of therapeutic quality and function – they let me get things ‘off my chest’ (p. 10). Belying the name, his “polemics” were carefully argued and empirically rich essays with a caustic self-deprecating air. He published many of them in Outlook India with Sundeep Dougal (Ajmal Kamal would publish the collected versions with his City Press). These collected essay volumes – A Killing in Ferozewala, The Muslim League in Barabanki and The Hijab and I – range across Pakistan, India, the US, the Middle East (Palestine, Iraq, Egypt). The essays constitute his daily reading of newspapers (a dozen each from these sites) and political commentaries, columns and the occasional book. Hence, they often start with his act of reading (a headline, a report, a quote), pulling back to assess the political and social context and then exposing the hypocrisy, or the hatred, or the falsity undergirding it all.After his retirement, Naim Sahib continued to visit Foster Hall for every Tuesday or Thursday seminar (and sometimes for the Friday teas). At the seminar, he would sit against the wall (alongside us students) and not at the table. Yet, he would often ask the first question. He would always speak about the topic/the argument with us students. He was deeply interested in the histories that Partition had erased, both structurally (by the rendering of archives and libraries and languages) and politically (by the creation of new majoritarian identities and ideologies). I remember fondly, in 2018, when I told him that I was writing a book on the early seventeenth century history by Muhammad Qasim Firishta (a book that I dedicated to him, alongside my two other teachers, Muzaffar Alam and Shahid Amin). He remembered that as a school child in British India, he was required to draw a map of India from memory. “Draw a vertical line 6” long (AB). Mark a spot 2” from the top. Draw a line (CD) 6” long dissecting the first line at 90 degrees, so that you have 2” on the left and 3” on the right. Mark a point (E) on it on the right at 2” from the dissection point. Now draw lines, connecting A and B to C and E. But extend lines AE and BE one inch further.” and so on. He later sent me a photograph of the exercise he had not done since was nine years old. He captioned it: “Drawn from memory+corrected from memory.”In Sufi cosmology, there are Beings (hasti) who anchor the world, orient it, are the lodestar. On that University of Chicago campus in September of 2001, he was the one person who stood and allowed us graduate students to feel brave enough to speak our minds in the face of rampant Islamophobia. He carefully marked for us all of the sites of dissent – “This was the bench where Hannah Arendt smoked”, “this was the window where the ’68 protestors were hanging out from”, “this is what Eqbal Ahmad said when the FBI showed up at his apartment,” etc. These stories were not just oral lore. For someone like me, they were oxygen. They showed to me that others had already occupied the very same grounds that I was forced to occupy, and they had asserted their dignity and humanity, nonetheless. This was the greatest lesson Naim Sahib would provide us: how to live critically, ethically and with dignity, no matter what.I wish I had another 90 years to learn from you, Naim Sahib. But I am profoundly grateful for the little that I was able to have of your learning. May you always be our lodestar.Manan Ahmed Asif is a professor of history at Columbia University. He received his PhD from University of Chicago in 2008.