Texts of Islam

Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans: Aḥmad Shāh, Abdālī, Shāh Durr-i-Durrān: The Poems of Aḥmad Shāh, Abdālī

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This is a selection of classical lyric poems — ghazals — 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 — the nightingale and rose, the Layla-and-Majnun legend, the wind-borne message — 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 — 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.

Selections from the Poetry of the Afghans: Aḥmad Shāh, Abdālī, Shāh Durr-i-Durrān: The Poems of Aḥmad Shāh, Abdālī

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