The Urdu ghazal, famously understood as a form comprised of disparate couplets, has hitherto been discussed as either a unity or a site of pure difference. This talk seeks to advance this debate to locate how the ghazal, both in form and content, reconciles fragmentation and totality, in-line with Sufi conceptions of the 'oneness of Being'.

Haider Ali is an MA student in English literature at McGill University. His primary area of focus is seventeenth-century English poetry, with an especial focus on Andrew Marvell and the figuration of the 'subject' (in relation to nature and society), but his work extends to mediaeval Italian poetry, French theoretical antihumanism, and Islamic and Christian mysticism.