Collection

Poems of Muslim Faith and Islamic Culture

A collection of poems, prose, and audio and video recordings that explore Islamic culture.

BY The Editors & Becca Klaver

Illustration of mosque arches and doors in different shades of blue.
Illustration by Deena Hashem.

These poems and features examine Muslim faith and Islamic culture and address important events, holidays, and occasions such as Ramadan. These poets explore a range of spiritual, literary, and political concerns from the 6th century to the present day. Some poets’ voices emerge from the East (Mahmoud Darwish and Saadi Youssef), others from the West (June Jordan and Thomas Merton). Most turn to poetry as the ideal forum to complicate simplistic East-West divisions—learning, questioning, sparking cultural conversation, and speaking from what Nomi Stone calls “[t]his quiet voice that is borrowed or my own.”

 

Poems
  • Ali, both a Kashmiri Muslim and U.S. National Book Award finalist, depicts ordinary activities in the intervals between salāh, the five-times-daily ritual prayer central to both Sunni and Shi’a Islam.
  • Palestinian exile Darwish’s speaker willingly loses his sense of individuality, time, and even gravity within the ancient walls of Jerusalem as he experiences the power of the city, one of the holiest for Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
  • Sparked by the imagined sound of the muezzin, the person who calls the community to salāh at dawn, Muske-Dukes’ traveler tries to make sense of cultural and religious phantasms, the people and rituals banished by the effects of war.
  • Translator Seidel describes his take on this 6th-century poem as a “cross-species salute”: less straight translation than a borrowing of Imru’ al-Qays’ “monorhymes” and “magnificence,” “Mu’allaqa” demonstrates the formal influence of canonical Arabic literature on an American author.
  • Jordan, who called her engagement with Middle Eastern unrest “the moral litmus test of [her] life,” both voices and critiques a typical Westerner’s frustration with media reports from the Islamic world as she strives to create an alternative discourse through poetry.
  • Nye, who grew up in San Antonio and Jerusalem, sketches vignettes of the praying methods of Muslim shepherds, embroiderers, and pilgrims in the title poem from her first book.
  • In a meditation on faith and communication, Stone gives an account of a non-Muslim’s attempt to observe Ramadan while living within a traditional Jewish community in Tunisia.
  • Iraq-born poet Youssef’s speaker’s strident address to America highlights the ways in which religion and conflict become bound up in one another in concepts such as “God’s soldiers.”
  • The correspondence between daily habits and world events like the refugee crisis is illuminated in Joudah’s brief and poignant anecdote.
  • Adonis, one of the great contemporary poets from the Middle East, uses variable, free-verse lines to create a subtle portrait of personal divisions that echo with geopolitical implications.
  • Ali describes this poem as about Laylat al-Qadr, the holiest night of Ramadan when “the angel first whispered the first words of the Quran into the Prophet’s ears”; but, Ali notes, nobody exactly knows when Laylat al-Qadr falls, an uncertainty as well as openness to spiritual experience that this poem explores.
  • In shimmering lines, poet Raza Ali Hasan assembles an elegant and complex meditation on landscape, architecture, and faith.
  • Darwish’s poem, from his first book to be published upon his return to his native Galilee after years of exile, The Stranger’s Bed, captures a series of intimate exchanges between “you” and “I,” stranger and friend, against a backdrop of political upheaval and terrible loss.
  • Detroit-born Hayan Charara offers an scathing critique of America’s favorite tagline—“Made in America”—in this unsettling yet tender portrait of his hometown and the people who make it run.
  • Dedicated to Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, Joudah’s sequence formally enacts the devastating separations that have ruled and determined the lives of Palestinians, elegizing as well as celebrating the fragility of ordinary life under siege.
  • The great Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali crafts a profound message of endurance and love in this parable of chance encounters.
  • Mojha Kahf’s witty, wise, and warm-hearted poem finds the speaker mediating between conflicting cultural and religious mores in, as her title promises, the bathroom at Sears.
  • Mattawa’s speaker wanders through the streets of Huun, the plains of Egypt, and the supermarkets of America where he meets the prophet Muhammad, the ghost of Walt Whitman, and the money-changers of Sallum in this tour-de-force meditation on a fruit “indispensable as water and air.”
  • Raza Kolb’s elegantly associative poem explores the links between family history, religious texts, typewriters and typography.
  • Indian poet Sheena Raza Faisal’s sly and humorous “introduction” finds and celebrates faith in unlikely places.
  • Mehri is the Young People’s Poet Laureate for London and youthful energy infuses this richly detailed poem of praise for a tight-knit community.
  • In a tender ode to her sister, Nafis artfully establishes the connections between embodiment, love, and Islam.
  • Using the strict conventions of an ancient Persian verse form, and invoking the Islamic daily rituals of prayer, Hassan crafts a searching inquiry into the complexities of race and religious practice.
  • In Muradi’s haunting poem, transliterated Arabic, Islamic rituals of prayer, and the threat of sexual violence echo and refract across cultural fault lines of female experience.
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