Abdul Manan Bhat

Abdul Manan is completing his PhD in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also a Penn Presidential Fellow. Manan is a scholar of Islam, literature, and lived religion with focus on the Persianate world. He specializes in religious, historiographical, and literary discourses on poetry in the Islamic intellectual tradition from the early modern to the modern period. His dissertation, titled "Postures of Tradition: Poems, Performance, Islamic Adab in the 20th Century", explores Urdu and Persian poetry and its performance across northern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan as a site of studying Islamic Adab in the 20th century, with a keen focus on adab's discursive and embodied formations. His project puts in conversation the careers of the Afghan poet Khalilullah Khalili (1907-1987) and the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984). His research engages diverse archival sites across Persian, Urdu, Arabic, Kashmiri, and Hindi, and he is currently studying Pashto.  

Manan is also a practicing Urdu poet. He has recited poetry upon invitation at poetry readings (mushairas) across South Asia, North America and Europe. A number of his ghazals have been sung by prominent classical singers in South Asia. He writes under the pen name ʿAlam (banner). Abdul Manan was born and brought up in Kashmir.