Ewan

Marian Gel A. Pesigan/BSP-3/WorldLit

Ghazal: This form of poetry is popular in the Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Bengali literature. It is characterized by five to fifteen couplets that have a refrain at the end of every second line. Each couplet of a ghazal can stand individually as each represents a distinct thought.

A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain. The form is ancient, originating in 6th-century Arabic verse. It is derived from the Arabian panegyric qasida. The structural requirements of the ghazal are similar in stringency to those of the Petrarchan sonnet. In style and content it is a genre that has proved capable of an extraordinary variety of expression around its central themes of love and separation. It is one of the principal poetic forms which the Indo-Perso-Arabic civilization offered to the eastern Islamic world.

The ghazal spread into South Asia in the 12th century due to the influence of Sufi mystics and the courts of the new Islamic Sultanate. Although the ghazal is most prominently a form of Dari poetry and Urdu poetry, today it is found in the poetry of many languages of the Indian sub-continent.

While it has close analogies in Arabic poetry, the ghazal is of Persian origin. Formally a short lyric composed in a single metre with a single rhyme throughout, in its style and content it is a genre which has proved capable of an extraordinary variety of expression around its central theme of love.

Biography of Allama Muhammad Iqbal

Sir Muhammad Iqbal, also known as Allama Iqbal, was a philosopher, poet and politician in British India who is widely regarded to have inspired the Pakistan Movement. He is considered one of the most important figures in Urdu literature, with literary work in both the Urdu and Persian languages.

Iqbal is admired as a prominent classical poet by Pakistani, Indian and other international scholars of literature....