Bouquets of Meaning: Mir Anis and the Devotion of Metaphors

​Some poets describe grief. Mīr Anīs made generations of mourners feel it.

​About the talk

​Mīr Anīs (d. 1874), a foundational voice in Urdu literature, is one of the finest eulogists in Islamic literary traditions across languages. His marsiyas, eulogies for Imam Hussain, move millions of people today just as they did in his own lifetime in the nineteenth century.

​Devotion is a key ingredient in Anīs's literary vision, a premise that frustrates the secular frameworks of modern literary criticism. Secular assumptions of modern literary criticism, including in Urdu, have conveniently ignored Mīr Anīs's work as a master theoretician of religious ideas and literary expression.

​Against much secular criticism, this talk will discuss how Mīr Anīs lays out, in his marsiyas and ghazals, aspects of creativity rooted in Islamic ideas, and we will follow how his visions of creativity espouse a universalism from the firm and rooted terrain of devotion.

​Not poetry in spite of faith. Poetry because of it.

​About the speaker

​Dr. Abdul Manan Bhat is a scholar of Islam and an Urdu poet from Kashmir whose work explores poetry, faith, and Urdu and Persian literature. He teaches at Harvard University and holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. He writes under the pen name ʿĀlam and has read his poetry across South Asia, North America, and Europe.

​Faculty profile: nelc.fas.harvard.edu/people/abdul-bhat

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