An early activist of the historic Pakistan Movement,[1] Qureshi served in the ministries of education and frontier regions as the secretary; in addition, he was elected a member of the parliament of Pakistan. But, due to his association with academia, he resigned from his government appointments and joined the academic faculty at the Columbia University as a professor of South Asian history. But soon, he returned to Pakistan and founded the National Language Authority (NLA) in the 1970s and helped set up the History Department at the University of the Punjab.