Islam as Expressed Through Artistic Mediums

All else I see not

One glimpse of my beloved

And my life is complete

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I search across the world

One glance of my aashiq’s mole

No treasure compares

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My Mashuq requests

The entirety of my soul

Willingly I give

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This week, in Persian Sufi Poetry as well as Conventions of the Urdu Ghazal, we read about how Sufi poets wrote love poems in the form of the Ghazal as a means by which to express their love with God. Crucially,  the poems never explicitly evoke any reference to God or the prophet. In fact, they are so entirely devoid of such explicit references, that one might easily take them to refer to some earthly lover. There is also never a mention of the gender of the lover, or aashiq. This type of poetry became so popular and widespread, that there would even be massive performances of Ghazals attended by tens of thousands of people. The Ghazal remains one of the most widely used forms of poetry across the world.

While the most widely accept form of Sufi poetry made usage of the Ghazal as the mode of expression, I decided to use the Haiku in order to highlight the multicultural nature of Islam. The idea of the Ghazal is to express the intense love experienced by the poet for (presumably) God, so the form is less important than the content. Some of the themes captured in these poems includes the idea of vision as an important sense in that “seeing” the beloved, or the mashuq, is considered essential to the poet’s purpose. The idea of the mole on the lip of the beloved is referencing a famous line from Hafiz, the famed poet, where he writes he would give away the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand for a glimpse of this mole as an indication of the intensity of his love. These were two major cities at the time and Samarkand was the capital of the Timurid Empire of which Hafiz’s homeland was a part of during the time of writing. This line eventually became famous and is found throughout Ghazal’s in many different languages. Through poetry, these poets sought to capture part of the essence of Islam in the love that one holds for the world and for God. The last poem also mentions giving the soul which references the possibility of the beloved actually being God and the submission of the soul as a metaphor for Islam itself, which literally translates to submission.