Khiyali of Heret
Introduction:
"Afghanistan saw the likes of many poets and writers in the
sixteenth, seventeenth, and the first half of the eighteenth century.
The partition of the country between Safawid Persia and the Mongol Empire
of India did not permit those poets to assemble in a center inside the
country or to enjoy the patronage of a local prince…but after 1747,
with the establishment of the Durran Empire, Kandahar and Kabul became
the seats of political and literary life in the country, attracting
the poets and writers of Afghanistan and the neighboring countries.
Khiyali of Heret is remembered by Muslims as a great poet of 17th
Century Afghanistan, a “leading mystic, and a famous Unitarian.”
The targets of your arrows,
O divine hunter,
Are the hearts of your lovers.
The people are concerned about you
And you are absent from them.
And at times I reside in a mosque;
I seek you constantly from house to house.
You are my goal, in Kaaba and the temple,
And you are my aim.
What is Kaaba and what is the temple,
Except mere pretexts!
Everyone praises you in his own way
And describes you in his own manner--
The lover in his songs of sorrow
And the musician in his harmonious tunes.
(p.333 Islamic Literature Najib Ullah Washington Square
Press, Inc. New York, 1963)
