Poetry as a Way of Knowing: Love, Language, and Poetic Form in Amir Khusraw and Fakhr al-Din Iraqi's Works

Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in South Asia, two poets lived not very far from each other. One of these, Fakhr al-Dīn ʿIrāqī, lived in Multan (in current-day Pakistan), and the other, Amīr Khusraw, lived in Delhi (in current-day India). They not only inhabited different centers of knowledge in the Indian subcontinent but were part of a shared Persianate literary culture and the broader Islamicate tradition. Today, in contemporary South Asia, the worlds of these two figures overlap through both the textual poetic tradition and through the oral and performed traditions of Qawwālī.

The dissertation takes Khusraw and ʿIrāqī as case studies to explore how poetry was articulated and performed as a mode of knowing during the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries. It explores the symbiotic interplay between literary form, content, and reader experience. The dissertation foregrounds the compositional mechanics that shape poetic meaning by focusing on metaphor (istiʿārah) in ʿIrāqī’s Lamaʿāt and ambiguity (īhām) in Khusraw’s Dībāchah. It asks questions such as: If a distinct mode of knowing emerges from the creative interplay of both form and the hermeneutical act of the reader/listener, what is it? What epistemic implications does this way of knowing a “thing” entail? Does the form—its use of literary devices such as imagery, metaphor, and personification (among others)—assert power over the reader? In ʿIrāqī’s work, the dissertation argues that metaphor enables the reader/listener to perceive the cosmos relationally. In Khusraw’s case, ambiguity functions as an epistemic mode that forces the reader/listener to inhabit multiple, often contradictory, meanings simultaneously. It argues that poetry, through its form, performs poetics and induces a deeper, embodied form of “knowing” to the audience by engaging their sensory, imaginative, and intellectual faculties.

Rather than homogenizing ʿIrāqī and Khusraw as Sufi poets, the study aims to recover emic categories internal to their works. To do so, it foregrounds the divergent Islamicate intellectual lineages they draw upon. Amīr Khusraw, particularly in the Dībāchah-yi Dīvān-i Ghurrat al-Kāmāl, draws upon Islamicate disciplines such as theology (kalām), rhetoric (balāghah), and philosophy (falsafah) to advance a conception of poetry as knowledge and wisdom (ḥikmah). ʿIrāqī synthesizes Akbarian metaphysics with the Persian literary school of love (mazhab-i ʿishq), showing that love (ʿishq) is not merely a concept but an embodied, affective, and immediate experience that requires direct tasting (dhawq).

The result is not merely a distinct diction but also divergent organizing principles of reality: ʿIrāqī centers ʿishq (love) as the fundamental principle that undergirds the entire cosmos, whereas Khusraw foregrounds speech (sukhan) as the creative force that brings the universe into being. By highlighting their distinctness, the dissertation seeks to show that both texts act as windows that exhibit the rich internal diversity within the Islamicate literary tradition. Moreover, it demonstrates how poetry, in their hands, becomes not merely a vehicle of knowledge but an epistemic act—capable of transforming how reality is known, sensed, and inhabited.