Amīr Khusraw and the Qur’ān: Poetry, Ambiguity, and the Search for Wisdom

Amīr Khusraw is one of the most famous poets from the Indian Subcontinent. A court poet of the Delhi Sultanate–one of the most important Islamic empires during the thirteenth century, Khusraw was at once a poet, Sufi, literary critic, linguaphile, and connoisseur of music. Khusraw played a central role in developing Indo-Persian aesthetics and poetics, laying the foundation for a distinct Indo-Persian literary heritage that remains alive in contemporary South Asia. Khusraw was deeply well versed in various Islamic intellectual sciences. This allowed him to not only creatively deploy from the literary and religious tradition(s) preceding him but also to synthesize them. Responding the the inimitability of the Qur’ān debate that explores the relationship between poetry and the Qur’ān, Khusraw penned a theoretical treatise titled Preface to the Full Moon of Perfection that creatively deploys tools from literary criticism and argues for poetry to be a source of wisdom.