{"collection":"Texts of Islam","full_text_available":false,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/sacred_texts_v1_isl_spa_spa17_htm/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/sacred_texts_v1_isl_spa_spa17_htm","id":"sacred_texts_v1_isl_spa_spa17_htm","license":"unknown_pending_legal_review","rights_basis":"sacred_texts_v1_preview_gate_primary_text_only; acquisition-method/ToS and compilation-copyright questions still open, not resolved by this gate","source":"sacred_texts_v1","source_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/isl/spa/spa17.htm","summary":"This is a selection of classical lyric poems \u2014 ghazals \u2014 from a 19th-century British anthology of Afghan (Pashto) verse, translated by H.G. Raverty and attributed to Ahmad Shah Durrani, the 18th-century founder of the Afghan state. The poems work within the Persianate courtly-love tradition, drawing on its stock imagery \u2014 the nightingale and rose, the Layla-and-Majnun legend, the wind-borne message \u2014 to meditate obsessively on love, longing, and the anguish of separation from the beloved. A recurring argument threads through several poems: that grief itself is the lover's proper condition, that suffering for love paradoxically constitutes happiness, and that the beloved's cruelty or absence does not diminish but intensifies devotion. The collection also includes poems that blur the line between erotic and mystical longing, using the beloved as a figure for God and framing surrender to love as a form of spiritual self-annihilation \u2014 a Sufi interpretive layer common to the tradition. What makes the collection distinctive is its authorship: that a conquering king and military founder is writing poetry of radical vulnerability and self-abasement, and signing each poem with his own name, situates these works at the intersection of imperial self-fashioning and classical literary convention. Raverty's Victorian translation smooths the verse into formal English couplets, making this as much a document of 19th-century British orientalism as of Afghan literary culture.","tags":[],"text":null,"title":"Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans: A\u1e25mad Sh\u0101h, Abd\u0101l\u012b, Sh\u0101h Durr-i-Durr\u0101n: The Poems of A\u1e25mad Sh\u0101h, Abd\u0101l\u012b","tradition":"Texts of Islam","translated_text":null,"word_count":2548}