From Hallaj to Heer: Poetic Knowledge and the Muslim Tradition (original) (raw)
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“Literary Romanticism and Islamic Modernity: The Case of Urdu Poetry”.
In the nineteenth century, Muslim modernist reformers sought to ground an agenda for social and political rejuvenation in a return to the spirit of the early Muslim community. However, the influence of this quest for communal regeneration on theological discourses was, in some cases, less notable than its influence upon projects for cultural and social reform. One area of focus for Indian modernists of the nineteenth century was literature and the literary arts, including poetry, which were now deemed relevant to notions of cultural health, authenticity and decline. Under the dictum that a people's condition is reflected in their language, the themes of moral degeneration and reform came to have a strong bearing on the indigenous valuation of poetry and the literary arts, challenging the criteria upon which such literature was judged. In this paper, I will analyse how the modernist agenda for social reform led to the birth of a new literary romanticism in Urdu poetry.
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I develop an approach to the “poetics” of music and movement, vis-`a-vis language, in the context of popular Sufism in South Asia. Bringing Michael Herzfeld’s notion of “social poetics” into creative dialogue with Katherine Ewing’s notion of the experiencing subject as a “bundle of agencies,” I attempt to cope with the problem of “meaning” in a highly heterogeneous event, the ‘urs in Lahore, Pakistan, commemorating the death of the Sufi saint Shah Husain. My pragmatic approach to navigating through an excess of meanings is to focus on what I call “common terms of understanding.” The analysis illuminates how Islam is popularly grounded in South Asia, more generally, and is suggestive of how music and movement might be construed as forms of religiopolitical “embodiment.”
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Arabic, Persian, and Turkic Poetics: Towards a Post-Eurocentric Literary Theory is a pioneering book that offers a fresh perspective on Arabic, Persian, and Turkic literature in their interrelations. The authors challenge Eurocentric paradigms while creating a framework for exploring these traditions on their own terms. Authored by an international team of scholars, the chapters centre the conceptual foundations of their respective literary traditions, with a focus on the discipline of comparative poetics ('ilm al-balāgha) in the Islamic world. By liberating the study of Islamicate literary texts from Eurocentric theoretical paradigms, the book paves the way for a more inclusive global discourse in literary studies. Specifically, the roots of this collaborative research in comparative poetics and in the rhetorical traditions of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkic worlds will foster new methods of close reading that are in line with the aesthetic standards intrinsic to these texts and their traditions. Engaging and insightful, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in broadening their understanding of world literature and literary theory.
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The paper looks at the mystique of the poetic process and the manner in which the subterranean cultural and primal patterns of the mind of the poet – Yasmeen Hameed, manifest themselves in the lyrics. Contrary to the western paradigm of duality such patterns are studied in the light of the oriental Sufi tradition where I and you pine for each other. The thee is perceived as the core and the me is in a perpetual quest/voyage gyrating towards the core. The convergence of these two poles is the unison that has both aesthetic/intellectual relevance as well as spiritual resonances for the reader and the poet alike. This gravitational pull finds expression in an idiom that is almost metaphysical in the poetry of Yasmeen Hameed. The paper explores how the two poles of the artistic process, the technical craftsmanship and content converge and finds expression in a language that is transparent as well as veiled. It also studies the way in which the visceral, existential poetic experience con...
Criticism of Kashmiri Sufi Poetry: An Appraisal
There are some questions and issues that have been hotly debated by critics of Kashmiri Sufi poetry. Reviewing the contemporary scenario of criticism of Kashmiri Sufi poetry one acutely feels the problem of hermeneutical despair. We have sharply divergent views equally guilty of meaning closure or epistemic chauvinism. We have critics admitting their failure to identify the signified of the term Kashmiri Sufi poetry as a separate genre. We have other critics disputing number of genuine Sufi poets and questions regarding Sufi poetic credentials of even major Sufi poets like Shams Faqeer and Wahab Khar. One reading reduces their number to seven. We have extremely conflicting estimates of more recent Sufi poets – mostly they are written off as copyists or not warranting serious critical attentions. We have from modern We have critics deploying psychological or psychoanalytic reductionism that reduces both loal and Sufi understanding of ishq to sex. We have no proper treatment of symbolism deployed by Sufi poets. We have neither metaphysical nor philosophical commentaries on it. We don’t see systematic application of any of major critical perspectives on representative selections of it. We have no systematic study that clarifies relation between Sufi and “non-Sufi romantic” or modernist poets. Sufi poetry has been subject of some doctoral theses from such stalwarts as Rashid Nazki and later scholars but a cursory perusal of all these studies shows their limited canvas in treating the deeper hermeneutical questions that we shall be exploring. Even such elementary questions as appropriation of traditional religious, philosophical and literary heritage in illiterate Sufi poets don’t seem to have been properly dealt with and we find senior scholars like G. N. Khayyal expressing inability to get proper answer to this issue from any contemporary work on criticism. Given this scenario, the paper calls for better attention to three things to properly study Kashmiri Sufi poetry: Metaphysics, symbolism and sacred centric criticism. All these things need to be properly clarified and salvaged from current misappropriations of them in academia. None of them are duly taken care of or taught in any of the departments devoted to literature due to various reasons. Kashmiri Sufi poetry awaits its proper appreciation and critical introduction to international audience let alone quality criticism. But our critics have written on certain aspects that is valuable but far from enough and that often evades or distorts certain issues in connection with it.
Churning Nectar on the Path of Muhammad: Of Ethical Imaginaries in Kashmiri Sufi Poetry
Mysticism and Ethics in Islam, 2021
In this paper, I will explore the contours of Rīshī Sufi poetry as a tradition of Islamic devotional literature inculcating unique religious and ethical visions nourished by an encounter of the Sanskritic Śaiva and Persianate Sufi imaginaries. I argue that Rīshī Sufi poetry is a multiform environment—that is, a space where the conceptual alignment of two premodern literary and religious imaginaries produces localized, unique visions of religious identity, practice, and conduct. Close readings reveal the Kashmiri Sufi corpus as a site of alignment, fostering polythetic ethical and religious imaginaries.