Azīz Ibnul Hasan writes that Salīm Ahmad’s creativity had several dimensions. He was a playwright, a script writer for films, a columnist etc., but two of his creative identities undermined the rest: Salīm Ahmad the poet and Salīm Ahmad the critic. Readers have their own  opinions about his two major creative spheres, but the truth is that he was beyond both these identities. As a critic, his favorite target was modernism or rather ‘partial modernism’ as he cynically named it. Similar was his sentiment about ‘progressivism’ and ‘Islamism’. The modernists rejected him as an ideologue and so did the religious zealots. Salīm Ahmad’s creative personality, its intellectual dimensions and his true worth are yet to be discovered.