{"id":28,"date":"2014-05-07T21:04:07","date_gmt":"2014-05-07T21:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/?p=28"},"modified":"2014-05-07T21:08:27","modified_gmt":"2014-05-07T21:08:27","slug":"ghazal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/2014\/05\/07\/ghazal\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghazal"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/a>\"Ghazal<\/a><\/p>\n

This ghazal encapsulates the theme of fleeting or fickle love that defines traditional, Urdu ghazal poetry. Consistent with Carla Petievich\u2019s \u201cConventions of the Urdu Ghazal,\u201d I take on the persona of an \u201cashiq,\u201d or lover, in addressing myself to the subject of love. Each couplet, or she\u2019rs, ends with the refrain, or radif, \u201cin longing\u201d to belabor the loneliness and agony of the subject as she yearns for the object of her love.<\/p>\n

The reader may find it hard to decipher whether the subject of love in this poem is God or another person. This ambiguity is concerted and is consistent with the blurring of divine and profane love also discussed in Petrievich\u2019s work. While the imagery of prayer and of attempting to pay what the subject seeks in this poem certainly lends itself to ideas of devotion to the divine, the emotions that manifest are consistent with emotions of heartbreak and the agony of a scorned lover or an unrequited love.<\/p>\n

The imagery of the moth being so drawn to a candle\u2019s flame, while knowing that its reunion with the flame will result in self-immolation, is one that is very prevalent in ghazals and in Islam more generally, as discussed by Renard in his \u201cSeven Doors to Islam\u201d and Gray in her \u201cThe Green Sea of Heaven.\u201d The idea that this death will be sweet, because it will be the culmination of a worldly life and the mudane life\u2019s substitution for a divine encounter with God, certainly carries spiritual weight. However, this sacrifice of the self in pursuit of the other also resonates in the self-sacrifice that consciously or unconsciously manifests in the all-encompassing love of another person, however ephemeral that love may be.<\/p>\n

While imagery of wine is also very common in traditional ghazals and in verses in the Qur\u2019an to symbolize both that which is forbidden and also that which represents the intoxication one experiences in loving God, here the wine could have a more literal or secular meaning. Similarly, the imagery of a prostrating figure could either invoke the prayer ritual common in Islam or could instead serve to express the complete vulnerability the subject experiences in submitting to an impossible love. The imagery of the sun\u2019s rays, described in the ghazal as \u201csigns,\u201d similarly could gesture toward the idea of God\u2019s divine touch being omnipresent, as discussed in the Qur\u2019an and mirrored quite literally in the term \u201cayah,\u201d or sign, to denote verses. Finally, the nom de plume, my own middle name Anneka, is included in the last couplet to situate the subject and reveal the identity of the lover, or ashiq.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This ghazal encapsulates the theme of fleeting or fickle love that defines traditional, Urdu ghazal poetry. Consistent with Carla Petievich\u2019s \u201cConventions of the Urdu Ghazal,\u201d I take on the persona of an \u201cashiq,\u201d or lover, in addressing myself to the subject of love. Each couplet, or she\u2019rs, ends with the refrain, or radif, \u201cin longing\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions\/42"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/prophetandislam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}