AT THE END
Notes: Waiz, in Urdu from Arabic, means preacher, homilist, adviser, admonisher, exhorter. Maaz is my takhallus (penname), from Arabic, and means asylum, refuge.
—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024
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Maaz Bin Bilal (from the conversation): “Poetry exists even in our cinema, for example, as most of our films, especially until recently, used to be musicals, so all the film songwriters are often poets from Urdu, which is my mother tongue. Urdu ghazals, which are derived from Persian ghazals, and which in turn are derived from Arabic ghazals, are sung often and set to music. As I was growing up in my own house, my father would often play the ghazal genre of music on the record or cassette player. So Urdu poetry, and film songs also, which are derived from particularly Urdu poetry and ghazals, were all around me. … [W]hile growing up, the ghazal was the kind of poetry that I was most in tune with. I soaked in the rhythms, the rhymes, the ideas.” (web)
