I would also not regard Iranian poets as being "outward looking." A Sufi in the Persianate tradition sees in worldly beauty a reflection of the Divine beauty and is therefore able to transform external phenomena into symbols of eternal Reality: hence Rumi's partly very "worldly"-looking verse. A single look into Hellmut Ritter's brief but weighty study, uber die Bllder-sprache Nizamis, would have persuaded Mr. Faruqi that wordplays and figures of speech are in fact part and parcel of Persian poetry, from where they were taken into Urdu. But the numerous German studies about Persian literature, Sufi poetry, and literary theory among the Muslims (such as Wolf hart Heinrich's important works) are unknown to Mr. Faruqi as tney are to most experts on Urdu literature. Two essays deal with Ghalib, "the difficult poet," and we certainly agree with most of Mr. Faruqi's skillful interpretation. But why should one not conceive of "the existence of a poet in the atmosphere of social prestige and power in which Ghalib grew up" (p. 42)? After all. Amir Khusrau was a highborn poet, and the number of aristocratic poets ^in the Muslim world is amazingly great. Classical Persian poetry was in fact primarily connected with the court. While I do not understand Mr. Faruqi's reasoning about this aspect of Ghalib's poetry, I would agree with his characterization of Ghalib as an "intellec-tualist"--even though some pages later Ghalib appears as a "romantic," and romanticism and intellectualism seem not to go well together, at least not according to, our tradition. Ghalib's difficulties as well as the ironical bent of his mind are well interpreted, particularly in "A Ghazal by Ghalib," which successfully disentangles the different strands of thought and layers of ideas that can be found in a single verse (even though the author does not tell us the page number in his sources or quote the first line of the poem). Again, however, one would have liked to see more references to the related imagery in classical Urdu or Persian poetry: for instance, in the very first line, the image of the mouth as a wound is, of course, unthinkable without Talib-i-Amuli's famous line that his mouth was "a wound which is now healed" (so that he cannot speak anymore). Alliteration--allegedly not common in classical Persian—is found not infrequently in Rumi's verse, where it forms an essential ingredient. The verse about the sun (p. 131) is certainly a reflection of Jami's description of beauty in YSsuf zulaixSf while the elegant verse about the stones (p. 132) of course refers to the scene in which Majnun is persecuted by streetboys who throw stones at him, a topic not only common in later Persian and Indo-Persian poetry (and also dear to Ghalib in general) but also beautifully illustrated by Mir Sayyid 'Ali in the British Museum Nizami, to mention only the finest example of a representation of the scene. While I find Mr. Faruqi's interpretation of Ghalib on the whole convincing and enjoyable, I am less happy with his approach to Iqbal. One essay bears the title "Iqbal, the Riddle of Lucretius, and Ghalib," which I find somewhat farfetched. Personally, I have never understood how Ghalib and Iqbal can be compared; they constitute, to my feeling, the most distant lines in the spectrum of poetry, even if Iqbal admits his admiration for Ghalib. But when he (Iqbal), in his early praise of Ghalib, claims that Ghalib's poetry proves "how far the bird of 104