Keeping in view Shahab's reputation as a man of integrity and a Sufi, one can say that, in the words of Mark Twain, he mainly told the truth but there were things that he stretched. But many bits of fact described in it have been questioned as they sound more like fiction. Qudratullah Shahab's Shahabnama is most probably Urdu's best-selling autobiography. I cannot say for sure whether it mars the image of a writer when the bits of fact in his or her autobiography sound like fiction, but I am positive that when bits of fiction sound like facts, it shows the writer's enviable command over the craft of story-telling. “NOTHING I have said is factual except the bits that sound like fiction,” said Clive James in his Unreliable Memoirs.
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