r Khursheed Rizvi’s chief pursuit has been literary scholarship, particularly in Arabic literature. He has devoted immense intellectual energy to studying pre-Islamic Arabic poetry. Arabi Adab Qabal az Islam (Arabic literature before Islam), in three volumes, is undoubtedly his magnum opus. Despite his enviable command of Arabic, Khursheed sahib has preferred to write in Urdu rather than Arabic. An Arabic translation of the 520-page Federal Shariat Court Judgment on Interest (Riba) from English is an exception.

His distinctive talent as a translator is most fully evident in his rendering of Qasida al-Burda (The Poem of the Mantle), a canonical work of the Muslim world composed by al-Busiri in the Thirteenth Century, under the title Al-Burda, in free verse, and in his translation of Fuat Sezgin’s Muhadarat fi Tarikh al-Ulum (Lectures on the History of Sciences). Sezgin, the Turkish-German scholar of Islamic history, literature, science and civilisation, challenged numerous myths produced by modern colonial Europe about Islamic history, the Arabs, Muslim philosophy and the Muslim contribution to Western civilisation. Sezgin’s central argument is that it is historically untenable to imagine human knowledge as a simple succession from the Greeks to modern Europe, with nothing intellectually significant between them. Medieval Muslim civilisation constitutes a crucial historical link in the development of human knowledge.

The book consists of lectures Sezgin delivered in Riyadh and published in 1979 and 1984. Khursheed sahib translated it during his stay at Idara-i-Tahqiqat-i-Islami, Islamabad (1985-1991). The subject seems particularly close to his intellectual and cultural identity. The translation is not merely a survey of the development of Muslim systems of knowledge; it also engages with the difficult question of the decline of Muslim scholarship. Khursheed sahib’s attraction to the book, therefore, seems both scholarly and deeply personal.

Khursheed sahib is equally remarkable for his engagement with Arabic and Urdu poetry. One of his recent scholarly works is devoted to the Arabic poetry of Altaf Hussain Hali, which had previously received little attention. He has written biographical-critical essays on Iqbal, Majeed Amjad, Nasir Kazmi, Ghulam Jeelani Asghar, Anwar Masood, and his teachers and peers, including Soofi Zia-ul-Haq, Mazhar Mahmood Sheerani and Wazir-ul-Hassan Abdi, which are collected in the books Taleef and Ameza. Among modern Arab writers, Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz appears to be his favourite. As for modern Arabic poets, he has recently undertaken detailed studies of Mahmoud Abu al-Wafa and the Syrian poet Adonis, later published in LUMS’s journal, Bunyad. In the Arab world, Egypt seems close to Khursheed sahib’s heart: Al-Busiri, Mahfooz and Wafa are all from the country.

Despite his passionate love for the Arabic language and literature, Khursheed sahib is essentially a writer of Urdu – not, however, in the conventional sense. Modern Urdu writers generally position themselves within the traditions of Urdu and world literature. In contrast, Khursheed sahib’s imagination remains deeply immersed in Arabic, Persian and selected strands of classical Urdu poetry. Urdu is not merely his mother tongue or the language of his cultural identity. Born in Amroha in 1942, Khursheed sahib comes from a city associated with people like Mushafi, Raees Amrohvi, Kamal Amrohvi and Jaun Elia. He seems closer in temperament to Mushafi than to Jaun.

Like the few honest, authentic and deeply committed writers we have, Khursheed sahib brings his whole being to whatever he undertakes: poetry, prose, scholarship or translation. Such a writer remains concerned with both the fullness of their being and the form best suited to express it. Within us, some things occupy the centre while others remain at the periphery; we naturally invest our best in the centre. For Khursheed sahib, that centre is poetry.

He has produced nine books of Urdu poetry. Although he has written nazm and rubaiyat, he is fundamentally a ghazal poet. Khursheed sahib’s temperament and worldview are essentially classical. He does not regard tradition as something to be discarded in the name of modernity; rather, he seeks to preserve its continuity and its religious-cultural ethos. In this respect, he differs from modernists who regard tradition as an impediment to expressing new experience and assume that the experiences of a new age require entirely new forms, manners and diction.

Khursheed sahib, however, also writes out of the new experiences of post-Partition Pakistani society. His position seems to be that although traditions, genres, forms and diction may be old, they are not necessarily exhausted. Tradition has a mode of existence fundamentally different from that of the individual: the individual dies; the tradition survives. But Khursheed sahib also recognises that tradition can become a burden, an obligation and an impediment. At its best, however, it can confront the chaos of an age through its inclusiveness, continuity and elasticity. As a poet, he understands that poetry is essentially a form of deviation; he, therefore, looks within classical tradition for spaces where deviation, innovation and individual experience can still occur.

His ghazals, particularly the earlier ones, make abundant use of classical diction, themes and references, yet the sensibility remains unmistakably individual. This point deserves emphasis because the word ‘tradition’ has become so frequently and mechanically used in discussions of the ghazal that it has lost much of its critical value. In Khursheed sahib’s poetry, tradition does not simply mean the repetition of inherited vocabulary or imagery. It means a portal into the cosmology of the classical Persian and Urdu ghazal.

That cosmology encompasses metaphorical worlds such as the gulistan, dasht, asman and bazaar; love; wahdat al-wujud and Sufi thought; and, at times, a critique of religious zahir-parasti. The familiar figures of bulbul, gul, saba, the cage, junun, complaint, falak, firaq, duniya, dahr, ahoo and wahshat all belong to this inherited universe. With the notable exception of the critique of religious ritualism, much of this cosmology reverberates through Khursheed sahib’s ghazal.

In Shakh-i-Tanha, much of the poetry concerns love and human relationships. In the classical ghazal, love often appears as an idea—something close to the Platonic conception of a persistent ideal whose manifestations may vary. In Khursheed sahib’s poetry, however, love is not a dogma or an abstract ideal; it is an experience. An experience reveals its contradictions. Love can be an elan vital, the force around which existence revolves, yet it can also become ordinary and familiar. At times, we feel the beloved’s presence in the deepest regions of our being; at other times, even the most beloved person can become a source of weariness. Khursheed sahib’s poetry captures precisely this paradox of love:

Teray baghair bhi katti rahi, zara na ruki
Shikayatein mujhay umr-i-gurezpa say hain

(Life continued to pass even without you; it did not pause for a moment. My complaint is with this ever-fleeing life.)

Jab kabhi khud ko yeh samjhaun keh tu mera nahin
Mujh mein koi cheekh uthta hai, nahin aisa nahin

(Whenever I try to convince myself that you are not mine, something within me cries out: No, that is not so.)

Kab nikalta hai koi dil mein utar jaanay ke ba’d
Is gali kay doosri jaanib koi rasta nahin

(Once someone has entered the heart, how can they ever leave? There is no road leading out from this street.)

Love is the dominant theme at the beginning of his poetic career, but gradually other themes enter almost imperceptibly. Among these, solitude and silence are particularly significant.

Hamein chaho, hamari qadr kar lo
Tumharay darmiyan baithay huay hain

(Love us; recognise our worth. We are sitting here, right among you.)

Jin logon mein rehta hoon, main un mein say nahin hoon
Hoon kaun, mujhay apna zamana nahin milta

(I live among people, yet I am not one of them. Who am I? I cannot find an age I can call my own.)

Tum ko meri uftaad ka andaaza nahin hai
Tanhaai sila hai mera, khamiyaza nahin hai

(You have no measure of my disposition; solitude is my reward, not my punishment.)

Silence in Khursheed sahib’s poetry unfolds as a vast inner space—a mode of being and a form of communication in which words become redundant and conventional expression falls away. Here, silence speaks in its own voice, one unfamiliar to the world of words.

Tamaam umr akelay mein tujh say baatein keen
Tamaam umr teray rubaru khamosh rahay

(All my life I spoke to you in solitude; all my life I remained silent before you.)

Main ameeq tha keh pala hua tha sukoot mein
Yeh jo log mahv-i-kalaam thay, mujhay kha gaye

(I was deep, having been nurtured in silence; these people, absorbed in endless speech, devoured me.)

Why does he say that people absorbed in speech “devoured” him? Is he merely suggesting that language consumes silence, or is he pointing towards a particular kind of speech that destroys the depth nourished by silence? From Bedil to Ghalib, poets have repeatedly elevated silence through the very medium of poetic language. Just as houses contain empty spaces inhabited by us, there are silences between words, within words, across words and beyond words. Such silence is not emptiness; it is felt and experienced. Khursheed sahib’s “chattering people” devour precisely this inward silence because their speech is merely noise.

A significant part of his poetry is devoted to exposing the follies and transgressions of these ahl-i-duniya—the worldly people:

Kisi din ahl-i-duniya say bahut door
Khuda kay bazuon mein ja kay royen

(Someday, far away from the worldly people, let us go and weep in God’s arms.)

Be-dili say kahan haath aatay hain hum
Dil laga kar hamein dhoondhta kaun hai

(How can we be found through indifference? Who searches for us with all their heart?)

Melancholy and suffering constitute another major dimension of Khursheed sahib’s poetry. His suffering is not merely existential—the pain of loneliness or alienation from people and the universe. It emerges more profoundly from the gradually revealed discrepancy between the idea of being in the world and the lived experience of living in it.

In one of his remarkable expressions, apnay imkan ka gham – the sorrow of one’s potential – Khursheed sahib touches upon a specifically human predicament. We sometimes sense the vastness of our capacities yet find ourselves unable to translate those possibilities into lived reality. The distance between what we might become and what we actually become produces suffering.

This may be why his poetry repeatedly returns to dreams, gardens, deserts, light and other associative images that gesture toward the possibilities of existence.

Bapa dil mein paiham yeh matam raha
Mujhy apnay imkan ka gham raha

(This mourning remained ceaselessly alive within my heart; I remained burdened by the sorrow of my own potential.)

Jo safha-i-dahr par nahin tha
Kyun khwab mein woh chaman dikhaya

(Why was I shown in a dream the garden that did not exist upon the page of the world?)

Kab tilak amal-girya raha kuchh nahin maloom
Khud mairi tabiyat nay sambhala mujhay aakhir

(How long I remained absorbed in the struggle of action and tears, I do not know; in the end, my own nature sustained me.)

Darta hoon bahut roshni-i-tab‘ say, Khursheed
Andha hi na kar day yeh ujala mujhay aakhir

(I greatly fear the radiance of my own temperament, Khursheed; lest this brightness should end up blinding me.)

Jitne asbab-i-tarab dahr mein hain sab maujood
Kya taqaza hai tera, tab‘-i-hazeen, naama’loom

(All the means of joy that exist in the world are present; what, then, does your melancholy nature demand? I do not know.)

Hum is dasht mein kyun guzaray gaye
Kahan baal-o-par woh hamaray gaye

(Why were we made to pass through this wilderness? Where have our wings gone?)

To be human, in Khursheed sahib’s poetry, is to experience possibility. We do not dream merely to escape reality; we dream because dreams offer a window onto another possible reality, or because they allow us to imagine transforming or bending the reality in which we live. When that transformation remains unrealised, the world turns into a dasht, a wasteland.

In his latest book, Neem Wa (Half-open), Khursheed sahib appears to revive, with renewed energy and from a new perspective, the classical ghazal tradition of ma‘ni-afrini, the creation of meaning. Behind this revival, one senses a nostalgia for an era represented by poets such as Dard and Dagh, who possessed both knowledge and a refined taste for language. There is also, perhaps, a quiet disappointment with the contemporary Urdu poetic milieu.

Ma‘ni-afrini and nazuk-khayali, associated especially with the poets of the Sabk-i-Hindi and subsequently developed by classical Urdu poets, including Nasikh and Ghalib, insist that poetry is not merely an arrangement of rhyme or an ornamental display of language. Its true task is to create meaning. Meaning emerges at the intersection of experience and idea, feeling and thought, the sensual and the cerebral. Such poetry need not violate aesthetic convention; rather, it expands the horizons of aesthetic possibility. In it, intellect and imagination join hands.

Khursheed sahib’s recent poetry seems to make precisely such a demand upon Urdu poetry.

The significance of Khursheed sahib’s poetry, therefore, lies not simply in its attachment to tradition. Its real achievement is in demonstrating how tradition can become a living resource for articulating contemporary experience.

His classical vocabulary is not merely an archive of inherited images; it is a living language through which solitude, alienation, love, suffering, melancholy, silence and the crisis of contemporary poetic culture acquire new meanings. Khursheed sahib does not sacrifice modern sensibility at the altar of tradition. Instead, he turns to tradition to uncover uncharted, silenced yet fertile spaces within it through which the modern experience can be explored and understood. To conclude this piece, I would like to quote just two couplets from Neem Wa that exemplify the delicacy, incisiveness and ephemerality of meaning, while touching upon something deep within our existence.

Khulta na ho keh kis nay bulaya hamein yahan
Bas anjuman ho, anjuman-ara kahin na ho
(It is unclear who invited us here; it is as if there is an assembly, but no one capable of giving that assembly meaning and beauty.)

Ab tum kahin milo to karein mil kay us ko yaad
Jo waqt hum nay saath guzara kahin na ho
(If we now meet somewhere, let us together remember the time we never spent together.)

The author is a Lahore-based Urdu critic and short story writer. He is associated with the Gurmani Centre at LUMS as Head of Publications. The Journey of Ideas is his latest book.