Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the author of poetry collections "Kohl and Chalk" and "Baker of Tarifa." Her latest work, "Ghazal Cosmopolitan," is a book of essays and poems exploring the culture and craft of the ghazal form. Winner of the San Diego Book Award for poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Prize and multiple Pushcart nominations, Zeest Hashmi's poetry has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu, and has appeared in anthologies and journals worldwide, most recently in McSweeney's "In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth." She has taught in the MFA program at San Diego State University as a writer-in-residence and her work has been included in the Language Arts curriculum for grades 7-12 (Asian American and Pacific Islander women poets) as well as college courses in Creative Writing and the Humanities.
Website: http://shadabhashmi.com
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Having never left town, Marjiana is an oyster, a watchful oyster, though her name means “small pearl.” She has read countless books to Ali Baba, books about lands and seas, their fruits and snakes, gems and poisons, and the skies and their mysteries. While Ali Baba dreams, Marjiana watches the world…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi 1. Roses Miniatures and illuminated manuscripts from the Islamic world offer up an abundance of floral depictions. Cultivating gardens and replicating them in art, has a spiritual dimension, as gardens symbolize paradise; “Jannah” in the Qur’an is a “hidden garden” that inspires to be revealed and realized in the creative arts.…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi 1. Teacup from Russia The first teacup I use as a child is not for tea but milk which is boiled and mixed with sugar. I blow on it to watch the steam disperse and the cream float. The teacup is Russian. This is just before the Soviet war begins in…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Note: This is Part 2 of my Umrah Travelogue. Link to Part 1: “Here I Am, Labbayk”: A Travelogue Everywhere you turn there is the face of God (Surah al-Baqarah, 2:115) At the Ka’ba, you spiral the great Oneness, now drifting closer, now farther, keeping your gaze centered, raising your hands…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi You arrive in Makkah, a stranger. The skyline, a hotel-scape, all cold commerce, won’t let you forget it. But aren’t you here to come closest to your heart, finally, to behold the Ka’ba whose cosmic coordinates you would easily recognize, even with eyes closed, led by a primordial longing? Your eyes…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi “Aik Shaam,” “An Evening (By the River Neckar)” is Iqbal’s ode to silence. A short lyric poem, it describes a rare personal moment in the vast corpus of a poet who is known by such hefty honorifics as “Allama” (the “learned one”), the “national” poet, “poet-philosopher,” or “Poet of the East.”…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Author’s Note: A version of this essay was presented at the London Arts-Based Research Conference (Dec ‘23) on the topic: “The Emergence of Soul: Jung and the Islamic World through Lecture and Art”. The Sufis aspire to the highest conception of love and understand it to be the vital force within,…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Masjid Al Aqsa, or The Far Mosque of Jerusalem, as the Quran calls it, is emblematic of the spirit of compassion and transcendence for Mevlana Rumi. “A heart sanctuary,” in the words of Rumi in his poem “The Far Mosque,” Al Aqsa represents a conquest over the egoistical desires of dominance,…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi At dusk, the shaft of light striking Rumi’s tomb is emollient as pale jade. It has been a long, hot day in Konya, I’ve been writing in a café-terrace overlooking the famed white and turquoise structure of the tomb-museum complex. I sip my tea slowly, facing the spare, elegant geometry of…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Dear Peridot Child, Cupped by mountains, you are thirty-two-something degrees North in latitude. You are of raw seasons, placed as a story within a story, a fledgeling in the rorschach nest of the imagination, the wordy part of the planet wound around your ears. You are your own battlefield, fired up…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Spanning just shy of a thousand years, al-Andalus or Muslim Spain (711-1492), has a riveting history. To picture the Andalus is to imagine a world that gratifies at once the intellect, the spirit and all the senses; it has drawn critical scholars, poets and musicians alike. Barring cycles of turbulence, it…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi I was so excited to meet Azra Bayru Kumcuoğlu, Rumi’s granddaughter (23rd generation) for breakfast on my latest visit to Istanbul— that I wore my pearls early in the morning and popped into a salon across from Boğaziçi University campus where I had been staying. Halfway through the blowout, it began…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi A tree in the vicinity of Rumi’s tomb has me transfixed. It isn’t the tree, actually, it is the force of attraction between tree-branch and sun-ray that seems to lift the tree off the ground and swirl it in sunshine, casting filigreed shadows on the concrete tiles across the courtyard. The tree’s heavenward…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi First, because Moses, or the prophet Musa as we know him in the Quran, is an unusual hero— a newborn all on his own, swaddled and floating in a papyrus basket on the Nile— my brothers and I couldn’t get enough of his story as children. Second, it is also a…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Before I met Hayat Nur Artiran, I had only had a raw understanding of what female selfhood may look like, a notion I have been attempting to refine in my writings over many years. Here, at the Mevlevi Sufi lodge in Istanbul, I received a lifetime’s worth of illumination about the…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi When the Rajah’s barber could no longer keep the secret, he was seen darting by the sparrow in the tamarind, by the flinty owl in the giant oak that was surely a jinn’s abode, by a flock of hill mynahs flying through the buttery light of early spring. What was it…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The language of light is compelling. The suggestions of light at daybreak are vastly different from twilight or starlight, the light of a firefly is not the same as that of embers or cat eyes, and light through a sapphire ring or a stained glass window is not the same as…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Gems carry a lure that is quintessentially primeval. Considered valuable throughout human history for obvious reasons such as rarity, durability and beauty, gems are inextricable not only from lore, art, architecture, culture, and craft, but also the aesthetics of language. Stories of different civilizations come to us carved in gemstones— Jade…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The month of Ramadan is at once a time of respite from the external— when one’s focus shifts from worldly affairs to the spiritual— and a time to deepen one’s sense of compassion and fellow-feeling via the rigors of daily fasting, prayer, reflection and generous giving. It is a time to…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi “A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore, we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is the men who pass away…” —Albert Camus…