Multan is older than the country that now files it as a district. Travellers called it the city of dust and the city of saints in the same paragraph, and both nicknames still work. The heat is not a metaphor. In June the brick stores the afternoon and gives it back at ten at night. Thursday at Bahauddin Zakariya and the skyline of Shah Rukn-e-Alam are how the city keeps time. Around them sit a medical university, an airport, a PSL ground and four tehsils that do not live the same life.
The 2023 census counted 5,362,305 people in 886,392 households on 3,720 km². Urban 2,499,871. Rural 2,862,434. Literacy 61.41 percent (men 67.28, women 55.27). Saraiki about 3.41 million. Urdu about 946,000. Punjabi about 854,000.
Multan City — 304 km², 2,555,486 people, literacy 73.65 percent. Hussain Agahi, the Fort, the mound.
Multan Saddar — 1,632 km², 1,516,004 people, literacy 52.01 percent. Orchards and schemes.
Shujabad — 806 km², 682,327 people, literacy 53.87 percent.
Jalalpur Pirwala — 978 km², 608,488 people, literacy 38.50 percent. The row the postcard never shows.
Bahauddin Zakariya (c. 1170–1262) made Multan a Suhrawardi capital. His grandson Shah Rukn-e-Alam (1251–1335) has the octagonal brick tower. Shah Shams Tabrez, Musa Pak Shaheed, Hafiz Jamal: the city is an urs calendar. Langahs, Mughals, Sikh siege of 1818, British storm of 1848–49, Partition 1947. The shrines stayed. The signs changed.
Kashi workshops still fire the glaze. Sohan halwa still rides the train. Chaunsa still pays the orchard. Khussa, camel-skin lamps, ginning sheds. Hussain Agahi is the old linear city. Bosan Road is the new one.
Suraiya Multanikar (b. 1940) took folk and playback out of the old singing bazaar; Pride of Performance and Sitara-i-Imtiaz followed. Saima Noor held Punjabi cinema. Hamza Ali Abbasi, Hajra Yamin, Najam Sheraz work the later screen and stage. Qawwali on Thursday does not need a producer.
Inzamam-ul-Haq, born Multan 3 March 1970, captain of Pakistan, still called Inzi. With him: Sohaib Maqsood, Rahat Ali, Asmavia Iqbal, Sania Khan. Multan Cricket Stadium and Multan Sultans put the name on PSL nights. Shoaib Malik is often typed next to Multan because of those nights; he was born in Sialkot in 1982. This page will not move his birth certificate.
Yousaf Raza Gillani — prime minister 2008–2012, later Senate chairman. Shah Mehmood Qureshi — foreign minister more than once. Javed Hashmi. Malik Rafique Rajwana, governor of Punjab. Sahibzada Farooq Ali, Hamid Saeed Kazmi. Shrine families and assembly houses overlap. In Multan that is the old operating system.
Bahauddin Zakariya University. Nishtar Medical University and Hospital. NFC, Emerson, the private strip. DHQ-level care at Nishtar; paying cases still leave for Lahore.
Figures from the 2023 census. Biographical lines from public records. Shoaib Malik’s Sialkot birth is noted so a common mix-up stops here.