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The ghazal (Arabic/Pashto/ Persian/Urdu: Turkish: gazel) is a poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets and a refrain, with each line sharing the same meter. A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain. The form is ancient, originating in 6th century pre-Islamic Arabic verse. It is derived from the Arabian panegyric qasida. The structural requirements of the ghazal are similar in stringency to those of the Petrarchan sonnet. In its style and content it is a genre which has proved capable of an extraordinary variety of expression around its central themes of love and separation. It is one of the principal poetic forms which the Indo-Perso-Arabic civilization offered to the eastern Islamic world.

The ghazal spread into South Asia in the 12th century under the influence of the new Islamic Sultanate courts and Sufi mystics. Although the ghazal is most prominently a form of Persian and Urdu poetry, today it is found in the poetry of many languages.

Ghazals were written by the Persian mystics and poets Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (13th century) and Hafez (14th century), the Azeri poet Fuzuli (16th century), as well as Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869) and Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), both of whom wrote ghazals in Persian and Urdu. Through the influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the ghazal became very popular in Germany in the 19th century, and the form was used extensively by Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) and August von Platen (1796–1835). The Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali was a proponent of the form, both in English and in other languages; he edited a volume of “real ghazals in English”.

In some ghazals the poet’s name is featured somewhere in the last verse (a convention known as takhallus).

Details of the form

• A ghazal is composed of five or more couplets.
• The second line of each couplet (or sher) in a ghazal usually ends with the repetition of a refrain of one or a few words, known as a radif, preceded by a rhyme known as the qaafiyaa. In Arabic, Persian and Turkic the couplet is termed a bayt and the line within the bayt is called a misra. In the first couplet, both lines end in the rhyme and refrain so that the ghazal’s rhyme scheme is AA BA CA etc.
• There can be no enjambement across the couplets in a strict ghazal; each couplet must be a complete sentence (or several sentences) in itself.
• All the couplets, and each line of each couplet, must share the same meter.
• Ghazal is simply the name of a form, and is not language-specific. Ghazals exist, for example, in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, Kashmiri, Kurdish and Pashtu and many other languages.
• In South Asian languages ghazals occasionally contain no radif. Such ghazals are termed “?air-muraddaf” ghazal. The pre-Islamic Arabian qasida was in monorhyme; like the rest of the qasida, the ghazal itself did not have a radif.
• Although every sher may be an independent poem in itself, the shers may share the same theme or even display continuity of thought. This is called a musalsal ghazal, or “continuous ghazal”. The ghazal “chupke chupke raat din aasUU bahaanaa yaad hai” is a famous example of a musalsal ghazal.
• In modern Urdu poetry, there are a few ghazals which do not follow the restriction that the same beher must be used in both the lines of a sher. But even in these ghazals, qaafiyaa and, usually, radif are present.
• By placing his or her takhallus (pen name) in the maqta or final sher, the poet traditionally attempted to secure credit for his or her work. Poets often made elegant use of their takhallus in the maqta.

Themes

Illicit unattainable love

The ghazal not only has a specific form, but traditionally deals with just one subject: Love. And not any kind of love, but specifically, an illicit and unattainable love. The subcontinental ghazals have an influence of Islamic Mysticism and the subject of love can usually be interpreted for a higher being or for a mortal beloved. The love is always viewed as something that will complete a human being, and if attained will lift him or her into the ranks of the wise, or will bring satisfaction to the soul of the poet. Traditional ghazal love may or may not have an explicit element of sexual desire in it, and the love may be spiritual. The love may be directed to a man or a woman.

The ghazal is always written from the point of view of the unrequited lover whose beloved is portrayed as unattainable. Most often either the beloved does not return the poet’s love or returns it without sincerity, or else the societal circumstances do not allow it. The lover is aware and resigned to this fate but continues loving nonetheless; the lyrical impetus of the poem derives from this tension. Representations of the lover’s powerlessness to resist his feelings often include lyrically exaggerated violence. The beloved’s power to captivate the speaker may be represented in extended metaphors about the “arrows of his eyes”, or by referring to the beloved as an assassin or a killer. Take for example the following couplets from Amir Khusro’s Persian ghazal Nami danam chi manzil buud shab:

nemidanam che manzel bood shab jayi ke man boodam;
be har soo raghse besmel bood shab jayi ke man boodam.
pari peykar negari sarv ghadi laleh rokhsari;
sarapa afat-e del bood shab jayi ke man boodam.

I wonder what was the place where I was last night,
All around me were half-slaughtered victims of love, tossing about in agony.
There was a nymph-like beloved with cypress-like form and tulip-like face,
Ruthlessly playing havoc with the hearts of the lovers.

(translated by S.A.H. Abidi)

http://www.youtube.com/Mehdi hassan

In the context of Sufism

It is not possible to get a full understanding of ghazal poetry without at least being familiar with some concepts of Sufism. All the major historical post-Islamic ghazal poets were either avowed Sufis themselves (like Rumi or Hafez), or were sympathizers with Sufi ideas. Most ghazals can be viewed in a spiritual context, with the Beloved being a metaphor for God, or the poet’s spiritual master. It is the intense Divine Love of sufism that serves as a model for all the forms of love found in ghazal poetry.

Most ghazal scholars today recognize that some ghazal couplets are exclusively about Divine Love (ishq-e-haqiqi), others are about “earthly love” (ishq-e-majazi), but many of them can be interpreted in either context.

Traditionally invoking melancholy, love, longing, and metaphysical questions, ghazals are often sung by Iranian, Afghan, Pakistani, and Indian musicians. The form has roots in seventh-century Arabia, and gained prominence in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century thanks to such Persian poets as Rumi and Hafez. In the eighteenth-century, the ghazal was used by poets writing in Urdu, a mix of the medieval languages of Northern India, including Persian. Among these poets, Ghalib is the recognized master.