Rumi, Lord Kitchener, Buddha, al-Hallaj, and Christ all walk into a celestial sphere—it’s the setup not for a bad joke, but for modernist Islamic poet and philosopher Mu?ammad Iqb?l’s (d.1938) late Persian masnav?, the Jav?dn?ma. In the Persianate traditions, the masnavi has represented one of the primary poetic forms in which Sufistic allegory structures a quest or romance narrative, presenting to the reader-as-disciple a progressive (if usually sprawling, digressive, and recursive) map or process towards perfecting the self in the service of contemplation of the divine. While locating itself in this literary tradition, the Jav?dn?ma undertakes an intertextual journey with two other sorts of travel narratives, journeying together in a unique encounter with the piece’s speaker-protagonist: the mi’rajnarrative, in which the speaker travels through a series of celestial spheres mirroring the Prophet Muhammad’s ascent into heaven, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the Jav?dn?ma, the character “Zinda-R?d” (“Living Stream”), guided by Rumi in place of Virgil, ascends through heaven’s seven spheres, each one populated with historical and literary figures from Europe and the Islamic world who converse with him as he seeks the divine presence. The final, most elusive traveling genre performed by the Jav?dn?ma is that of the ghazal embedded within the masnavi framework. The rhyming verse is interrupted by lyric interludes as the reader travels between poetic forms throughout the framing narrative. In identifying these moments of peripatetic poetic encounter, this paper puts forth an interpretation of Iqbal’s use of lyric to trouble the destination-oriented movement of narrative: why do the ghazal sections always occur as an individualized, first-person voice (or, more accurately, song)? What is accomplished in terms of narrative and thematic motion, descriptive characterization, and rhetorical voicing in these sections that the surrounding masnavi form cannot encapsulate? How do the ghazals function cross-textually, in harmony and counterpoint with one another and with the broader categories of traveling Sufi poetry? The ways genre travels within the Jav?dn?ma and its relation to the traveling speakers, map out the possibilities of various poetic forms in this text as they relate to the framework of the spiritual journey: the lyric ghazal seems always to be one step ahead of the masnavi, exemplifying the instability of linguistic striving toward the divine, generating their creative power from their insistence on the inability to reach a final narrative destination.