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An exploration of the origins, evolution, and migration of one of the world's great poetic genres, the ghazal (short lyric poem, usually on love). Starting with a discussion of the origins of the genre in the late pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods in Arabic and Persian, then moving to an examination of the evolution of the genre in the early medieval Islamic period in those languages, and the subsequent emergence of the ghazal in the related literatures of Hebrew, Ottoman Turkish and Urdu. Consideration of European translations of ghazals in the 18th and 19th centuries, the effect of these translations on contemporary European poetry, and the migration of the genre into English in the 19th and 20th centuries.