Texts of Islam

Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans: Æabd-ul-Ḳādir Khān, Khattak: The Poems of Æabd-ul-Ḳādir Khān, Khattak

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This is a 19th-century English translation of classical Pashto lyric poetry, drawn from H.G. Raverty's 1868 anthology of Afghan verse, with the selections here attributed primarily to the poet Abd-ul-Qadir. The poems follow the conventions of the Persianate ghazal tradition — recurring figures of the cupbearer, the nightingale and rose, the beloved's eyes and curls, wine and the tavern — deployed across interlocking themes of romantic longing, the pain of separation, and the inconstancy of the beloved. Running alongside the erotic register is a pronounced Sufi undertow: wine and intoxication read as spiritual annihilation, the tavern as refuge from worldly vanity, and the beloved's face as a manifestation of divine beauty that undoes the speaker's selfhood. The poems also carry a sustained moralist thread — on generosity without expectation, contentment, the folly of wealth-hoarding, and the brevity of earthly life — framed through aphoristic couplets that give the verse an almost gnomic quality. Raverty's Victorian English renders the imagery faithfully but with period formality ("parterre," "dinār," copious exclamation), so readers will encounter the content filtered through a translator's cultural distance. This collection is valuable for anyone interested in classical Pashto literary culture, Islamic mystical poetry outside the Persian and Urdu canons, or the 19th-century European project of translating and anthologizing "Oriental" verse.

Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans: Æabd-ul-Ḳādir Khān, Khattak: The Poems of Æabd-ul-Ḳādir Khān, Khattak

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