Lahore · Anno MMXXVI
Ali Shah
Chief Executive of SABCON. Co-Founder of COLABS. Custodian of Haveli Barood Khana, the 18th-century house in the Walled City that hosted Iqbal, Jinnah and Faiz, and that his family has held since c. 1840.
Chief Executive, SABCON · Co-Founder, COLABS
Custodian of Haveli Barood Khana
A Note from the Editor
Some lives are written in a single hand.
Ali Shah's is written in four.
The architect, the founder, the custodian, and the inheritor of a poet's name. This site is a record of all four, told the way an old Lahori family tells its own stories. In full. Across generations. With the weight of a city, and the cadence of a couplet, behind every word.
The thread that runs through it is older than any of the ventures, older than the Haveli itself in spirit if not in stone: the conviction, drawn straight from Bal-e-Jibril, that a self is not given. It is built. Brick upon brick, decision upon decision, generation upon generation.
خودی کو کر بلند اتنا کہ ہر تقدیر سے پہلے ۔ خدا بندے سے خود پوچھے ، بتا تیری رضا کیا ہے
“Raise the self so high that, before each decree of fate, God Himself shall ask the servant: tell me, what is your will?”
The Three Pillars
The man, in three rooms.
I
SABCON
Real Estate & Development
A fourth-generation development house in Lahore. Built on the long view, not the quarter.
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II
COLABS
Co-Working & Community
Co-founded with his twin brother Omar. An address for Pakistan's founders.
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III
Barood Khana
Heritage & Custody
Seven generations inside one house. A working residence, an archive, a citizenship.
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The Lineage
The Barood Khana family, and the poet who joined it.
A contractor to the Raj, a Lord Mayor of Lahore, the poet who conceived Pakistan joined to the line by marriage, and the cultural patron under whom Ali Shah grew up.
c. 1840
Mian Karim Baksh
Contractor to the Raj. Built Lahore Railway Station, Town Hall, and Government College.
1947 – 49
Mian Amiruddin
First Muslim Lord Mayor of Lahore. Present at the Lahore Resolution, 1940.
b. 1949
Yousaf Salahuddin
Maternal grandson of Allama Iqbal. Custodian of the Haveli; founder of Virsa.
Today
Ali Shah
Nephew of Yousaf Salli. CEO of SABCON; Co-Founder of COLABS.
Allama Iqbal (1877 – 1938) entered the family through marriage. His daughter married into the Barood Khana line, making Yousaf Salahuddin, Ali Shah's uncle, the literal grandson of the Poet of the East.
Chapter II
What he builds.
Lahore, in plan and elevation
Fourth-generation development house.
An office for a country's founders
Co-working as civic infrastructure.
18th century to the present
An ammunition depot.
A family seat. A salon for a nation.
Built under the Sikh Empire as the city's primary arms magazine, acquired by Mian Karim Baksh around 1840, host to Iqbal, Jinnah and Faiz, and the room a great-great-grandfather designed and Ali Shah still works in.
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