ABSTRACT

People are always tempted to compare the ghazal to the sonnet. Poems in the two genres are usually about the same length, and they share a basically romantic and introspective sensibility. A Western scholar, Paul Oppenheimer, has recently called the sonnet “the oldest poetic form still in wide popular use,” and has proudly traced it back through a number of European languages to its origins in Italy in the early thirteenth century. He has failed to do his cross-cultural homework, however, for the ghazal antedates the sonnet by about six hundred years: it traces its origins back to seventh-century Arabic poetry. From Arabic it spread into a number of languages, most notably Persian, Turkish, and then Urdu—where it is thriving today not only as a sophisticated genre of modern poetry, but also in the popular media: “filmi” ghazals and “filmi” versions of classical ghazals have made themselves at home in the movie industry, and on radio, television, and cassette.