Development of the ghazal and Khāqānī's contribution

Ghazal is the most important poetic genre in the Persian-speaking world, but also extremely prevalent in South Asia. The inter-regional influences of the ghazal are immense, both in terms of prominence and culturally nuanced themes and rhetoric, especially when considering Indo-Persian studies. Afḍal al-Dīn Khāqānī Shirvānī (12th c.), who is arguably the most difficult prose writer and poet in the Persian-speaking world, stands as a harbinger to the development of the ghazal, in terms of both theme and language. His ghazal poetry foreshadows the many literary schools that follow, most specifically, the fifteenth-century Sabk-i Hindi (the Indian Style). The book by Alireza Korangy treats, specifically, the ghazal poetry of Iran and its development as a genre. It also treats the influences of Khāqānī as a focal point of divergence in ghazal’s linguistic and thematic development. The embryonic stages of ghazal in classical Persian verse, from the ninth to the twelfth century, are examined from the point of view of theme, rhetoric, and prosody under the rubric of historicity and cross-linguistic correlation. This is an in-depth analysis and interpretation of more than fifty Arab and Persian poets in order to examine the thematic borrowings prevalent in the early and eventually later stages of ghazal development.