About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the Urdu text and a new English translation of eighteen *ghazals* (lyric poems) by Shah Abdul Aleem Aasi Ghazipuri (d. 1917), Sufi master and poet. They are all the poems by Aasi on Urdu Wikisource. The title, *Aasi Ghazipuri ka Kalam* ("Poems of Aasi Ghazipuri"), has been given to this selection by the present edition.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the eighteen pages listed under the author, downloaded in October 2026. The source pages carry no modern editorial matter. Where a reading is obscure, the translation gives the most likely sense and says so in a note.

What is left out and what was changed: nothing has been left out. The ghazals are given in the order of the source, which is broadly alphabetical by first line, and are headed by their first line. In one closing couplet the source spells the pen name آصی instead of آسی; it is printed as found, with a note.

Copyright: Aasi died in 1917, so his poems are in the public domain everywhere. The English translation is new. Translator's notes are marked [TN: …]. The translation keeps each line of verse as a line, and puts accuracy before rhyme. The pen name Aasi is kept as a name.

Names are spelled in one way throughout: Ghazipur, Jaunpur, Medina, Karbala, Canaan, Egypt; Joseph, Khizr; Laila, Qais (Majnun); Ali (Murtaza, Haidar); Nasikh.

Introduction

Shah Muhammad Abdul Aleem, who wrote as Aasi, belonged to a family of Sufis of eastern India and spent his life at Ghazipur on the Ganges, where he was the head of a Sufi house and guided many disciples. He died there in 1917. His pen name means "the sinner", a fitting humility for a spiritual master, and his poems were collected after his death in a *diwan* (collected poems).

Aasi wrote in the classical manner of the Lucknow school; in his last couplet here he quotes the counsel of Nasikh, the founder of that school, that every couplet in a ghazal should be good enough to survive a selection. But the ghazal in his hands is above all a Sufi poem. The beloved is God, whose glory shines in everything ("Only the blind do not see you"), and the lover's goal is *fana*, the passing away of the self, so that "Before meeting one must pass away; then how can he who has passed away meet?"

The usual figures of the ghazal, the tavern and the preacher, the cupbearer and the idol, the captive bird and the cruel beloved, are all here, but they carry this inward meaning. Several poems turn to Medina and the Prophet's intercession, and to Ali, from whom the Sufi orders trace their line. Beside them stand ghazals of plain earthly longing, such as the night of separation "when my heart leaps into my mouth", which show that the master was also a poet of the senses.