Ghazal

The shape of a ghazal

A ghazal is a short poem of rhyming couplets. Poets call a couplet a sher, or bayt. Most poems hold seven to twelve of them; five is the minimum, and anything past fifteen is usually called a qasida instead. Both lines of a couplet share one metre. The first couplet, the matla', sets the rhyme, the qafiya, and the returning word or phrase, the radif, that later couplets pick up in their second line. The closing couplet, the maqta', often carries the poet's pen name, the takhallus, and tends to sound more personal. Couplets stand alone in meaning, yet hang together in tone.

Out of Arabic verse

The form grew in seventh-century Arabia out of the qasida, a long poem that could run to a hundred couplets and dealt with tribal praise, satire or moral sayings. Its opening prelude, the nasib, dwelt on longing and romance, and poets began writing such passages on their own; those shorter poems became ghazals. Under the Umayyads, who ruled from 661 to 750, and in the early Abbasid period it settled into an independent genre, keeping the qasida's strict metre and end rhyme but turning shorter and lighter. Two early strands are named: the Udhri school of devoted, Platonic love, and the Hijazi school, franker and more playful.

Persian and Urdu

Persian poets took up the ghazal in the tenth century. Rudaki, who died in 941, fitted Arabic quantitative metres to Persian. Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the form hardened: the pen name became a required part of the last couplet, as it was by the time of Saadi Shirazi (d. 1291), and each couplet stayed a self-contained unit. Saadi and Hafez are among its celebrated Persian masters. Persian served the Mughal administration, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries poets were writing ghazals in Urdu. Mir Taqi Mir and Mirza Ghalib are the names most often given to that golden age in northern India.

The Malay ghazal

A second, sung life of the ghazal took root on the Malay Peninsula, always in Malay. Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs brought it, and it found favour in Malay court circles around Johor and the Riau islands. Its spread followed Temenggong Abdul Rahman's move to Telok Blangah in Singapore after the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824, and the arrival of North Indian workers under British rule. The Western violin took the place of the sarangi, and an accordion sometimes stood in for the harmonium. One strong supporter was Muhammad Salleh Perang, a surveyor employed by Johor. Penang's Jawi Peranakan community kept a rarer form, ghazal parti.

Reading the images

Ghazals say more than one thing at once, and readers learn the shared pictures that carry the meaning. An Urdu couplet may sit in a garden, where the poet becomes the bulbul, a singing bird, and the beloved is a rose. Or it may sit in the tavern, the maikhana, where wine stands for the search for understanding, for union with God, or for the emptying of the self. Poets of the past, Ghalib among them, used these settings freely. Abdolhamid Ziaei lists four strands in old Persian ghazal: love, mysticism, teaching or excellence, and the Qalandari strain.

How Ghazal is kept

A ghazal is made of couplets, and a poet writing one follows a fixed pattern. Each couplet is called a sher, or bayt, and its two lines share the same metre. The opening couplet, the matla', sets both the rhyme and the refrain that returns at the end of later couplets. Poets often sign the closing couplet with a pen name. Listeners at a mushaira, or at a song performance, follow the returns of the refrain. Reciters and singers hold the whole poem in mind, not a single couplet.

When and where

The ghazal is not fixed to a date. It belongs to poetry gatherings and music sessions held whenever poets or singers meet, and it appears in films, recordings and recitals through the year. Its history is what gets dated rather than its performance: it took shape in Arabic poetry in the seventh century and reached Persian, then South Asian, literature in the centuries after.

Ghazals are written and sung across South Asia, most strongly in Urdu and Persian, and also in Turkish, Bengali and other languages. The Malay-language ghazal is kept in Johor and Singapore, with a rarer form, ghazal parti, in Penang. Medieval Spain had ghazals in both Arabic and Hebrew, and the form reached parts of West Africa as well.

What Ghazal means

For those who keep it, the ghazal is a way of speaking about longing. The lover is often left out, the beloved indifferent, and the poem holds both the wound of separation and the beauty that survives it. Sufi poets read the same lines as longing for the divine. Because a ghazal says several things at once, listeners learn its familiar images, the garden and the nightingale, the tavern and the wine, and hear more in a line each time.

Questions people ask about Ghazal

See also

BhangraA Punjabi harvest dance, first kept by farmers and now performed worldwidePangalayA traditional fingernail dance of the Tausūg and Bajau peoples in the Sulu Archipelago and Sabah.HalayA traditional line and circle folk dance kept across Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Iran, and Syria.Glove puppetryA traditional theatre of cloth-bodied puppets with carved wooden heads and live music

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle

• Ghazal on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data

It may contain mistakes. Traditions differ from one family, village and community to the next, and the people who keep them know them best. If something is wrong, tell us. Last refreshed 2026-10-05.