While the poetry of Hafez Shirazi has been the focus of many mystical analysis, the poetry of his contemporary, Jahan Malik Khatun, who was in conversation with the poet has rarely been studied. The introduction to her Divan illustrates that she consciously positioned herself as a female poet among his male peers in Shiraz in general, and Hafez in particular. In this paper, I look at the ghazals of this fourteenth-century poet to study the mystical elements that appear in her poetry and contextualize them within the larger conversations about what we mean by the “mystical".
Religious Studies/Theology