Tulips, Tessellation, Translation: The Ethos of Harmony

Featured / November 29, 2023 Tulips, Tessellation, Translation: The Ethos of Harmony The photograph before me is from a summer morning in 1982, from an album of that year’s Eid ul Fitr congregation. Taken with our very basic snapshot camera, the Kodak Tele-Instammatic 608, it lacks the sharpness and vivid colours we are so used […]

Translating Amir Khusrau’s ‘Zihaal-e-Miskeen’, The Ghazal Of Ghazals

Featured / November 27, 2023 Translating Amir Khusrau’s ‘Zihaal-e-Miskeen’, The Ghazal Of Ghazals ‘Zihaal’ is a paradox: it combines two disparate languages so successfully in the ghazal form that they eventually became one language. On the other hand, this ghazal defies text, it defies a satisfactory interpretation of its gestures without oral rendition. Poetry often […]

The Sublime Child In The Persona Of Moses

ghazal / November 14, 2022 The Sublime Child In The Persona Of Moses First, because Moses, or the prophet Musa as we know him in the Quran, is an unusual hero— a newborn all on his own, swaddled and floating in a papyrus basket on the Nile— my brothers and I couldn’t get enough of […]