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1084 books found.
دیوانِ غالب
By مرزا غالب
This collection presents the Urdu poetry of Mirza Ghalib, including ghazals, qasidas, qit'as, rubaiyat and other verse arranged in the sections of the source web book. Ghalib's intricate lyric poems explore love, longing, wit, faith and the uncertainties of human life.
52 chapters · About 291 minutes of published text
رسالة الغفران: الجزء الأول
By أبو العلاء المعري
The blind poet Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri of Syria wrote this long letter to a minor Aleppan scholar in the eleventh century, and it turns into an imagined journey through the Garden: the scholar enters paradise and meets the great poets of Arabic, from al-A'sha and Labid to Antara and Tarafa. Part one is the tour of the Garden, with its rivers of wine, learned talk and laughing wit at the expense of the grammarians. The book is often set beside Dante's Comedy, though it is some three centuries earlier.
28 chapters · About 81 minutes of published text
رسالة الغفران: الجزء الثاني
By أبو العلاء المعري
The second part of al-Ma'arri's Epistle of Forgiveness leaves the Garden for the other side of the next world, where the scholar meets Sibawayh, Di'bil, al-Hallaj, Ibn al-Rumi, Ibn al-Rawandi and other grammarians, poets and freethinkers of earlier centuries and hears what became of them. The blind poet of Ma'arra keeps up his dry irony throughout while asking who may hope for pardon.
16 chapters · About 69 minutes of published text
رسالہ نذر آصف یعنی مرقع زبان و بیان دہلی
By سید احمد دہلوی
Syed Ahmad Dehlvi describes the speech of Delhi across generations and social settings. The essays compare court and city usage, record women's idioms, and examine the languages that shaped Urdu.
18 chapters · About 105 minutes of published text
رشید و زہرہ
By منشی محمد مصطفیٰ خاں آفت
Muhammad Mustafa Khan Aafat's Rashid o Zohra is a short nineteenth-century romance in eight chapters, each headed by its number in words and opened with a verse. It tells of the love of Rashid and Zohra and the troubles that bring Zohra to grief.
8 chapters · About 60 minutes of published text
زبان اردو کی ترقی کا مسئلہ
By سید سلیمان ندوی
Syed Sulaiman Nadvi considers obstacles to the development of Urdu and proposes ways to strengthen the language. The work brings together two essays, including answers to questions from Anjuman Urdu-e-Mualla.
2 chapters · About 29 minutes of published text
سیر ایران
By محمد حسین آزاد
After returning from Iran, Muhammad Husain Azad described his journey in a lecture delivered in Lahore. This short work preserves his observations in a preface and the lecture itself.
1 chapter · About 29 minutes of published text
شاہی سیر کشمیر
By محمد الدین فوق
Muhammad Din Fauq recounts the visits of four Mughal emperors to Kashmir. Separate sections follow Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb through the valley and its courtly history.
5 chapters · About 38 minutes of published text
شرر کے سفرنامے
By عبد الحلیم شرر
Four travel pieces by Abdul Halim Sharar take readers to Gibraltar, Italy, Switzerland, and Palanpur. Originally published in his magazine Dilgudaz, they record the places and encounters of his journeys.
4 chapters · About 64 minutes of published text
شگوفۂ محبت
By رجب علی بیگ سرور
Rajab Ali Beg Suroor's Blossom of Love (about 1864) is a late fairy-realm romance written, like his earlier Tale of Wonders, in elaborate rhymed prose. Each chapter is headed by a long rhyming sentence that tells what the chapter holds.
11 chapters · About 116 minutes of published text
طوق الحمامة
By ابن حزم
Written about 1022 by the Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm of Cordoba, the Ring of the Dove is a treatise on love and lovers, set out in thirty chapters from the nature of love and its signs to meeting, separation, betrayal and death, and closing with the ugliness of sin and the merit of chastity. It is a book of essays, but it is held together by the stories Ibn Hazm tells of people he knew, and by his own verse.
32 chapters · About 125 minutes of published text
غابة الحق
By فرنسيس مراش
Francis Marrash of Aleppo published this allegory in Beirut in 1865 (the Wikisource text follows an 1881 printing), and it is counted among the first works of imaginative prose in modern Arabic. The narrator dreams his way into a forest kingdom where the Spirit, Politics, Civilisation and the leaders of Evil appear as persons, and the book follows what he sees there, with a trial among its set pieces. Marrash uses the dream to argue for freedom, learning and civic virtue.
9 chapters · About 112 minutes of published text
فردوس بریں
By عبد الحلیم شرر
On a mountain road in thirteenth-century Persia, a young man meets a girl who leads him into the hidden garden of the Assassin sect, whose master calls it paradise on earth. Abdul Halim Sharar's historical romance follows the lovers as they find out how the paradise is staged and try to escape it.
9 chapters · About 217 minutes of published text
فسانۂ عجائب
By رجب علی بیگ سرور
Rajab Ali Beg Suroor's Tale of Wonders (1824) is a fairy-tale romance in which a prince sets out to find the beloved he has seen in a dream, and meets magicians, jinn and rival kings on the way. It is the best-known example of Lucknow's ornate rhymed prose, and its opening chapters also describe the city itself.
25 chapters · About 357 minutes of published text
فسانہء مبتلا
By ڈپٹی نذیر احمد
Deputy Nazir Ahmad's novel of 1885 follows Mubtila, a young Delhi man whose wish for a second wife and a freer life brings ruin on his household. Written as a warning against polygamy and idleness, it tells the story of one family over fifty-four short chapters, in plain Urdu and with a good deal of domestic detail.
54 chapters · About 286 minutes of published text
قصہ گرو چیلہ
The Tale of Teacher and Disciple is a very short book of four fables told as a guru and his pupil go on their way, meeting a greedy fox, a procuress, a cobbler and a barber's wife. The tales are told in early Urdu prose, with verses and proverbs among them, and each leaves the pupil a lesson.
4 chapters · About 27 minutes of published text
قصۂ مقتول جفا
By حافظ امیر الدین دہلوی
Hafiz Amiruddin Dehlvi's Qissa Maqtool-e-Jafa, also called Fasana-e-Gham-Amood, is a short dastan of the nineteenth century in the old storyteller's manner. It opens in a great, prosperous city of India, where the king puts a question to his four ministers and three of them refuse to answer it.
3 chapters · About 75 minutes of published text
قواعد میر
By خواجہ عبد الرؤوف عشرت لکھنوی
Khwaja Abdul Rauf Ishrat Lakhnavi sets down rules of Urdu usage that he associates with the tradition of Mir Taqi Mir. Its short chapters treat word formation, gender, metaphor, idiom, and literary expression.
7 chapters · About 49 minutes of published text
كليلة ودمنة
By ابن المقفع
The Indian king Dabshalim asks the philosopher Bidpai for a parable of two friends set against each other by a liar, and the answer, the tale of the lion, the bull and the two jackals Kalila and Dimna, opens a cascade of animal fables nested one inside another. Ibn al-Muqaffa's eighth-century Arabic prose became a model of the language and a handbook for rulers.
19 chapters · About 199 minutes of published text
گوہر مقصود
By راشد الخیری
Rashid ul Khairi's Gauhar-e-Maqsood is a slim book of two stories, Khayalistan ki Pari and Lal ki Talash. The first begins in the fairy kingdom of Khayalistan, where the fairy Ghafira is sentenced to lose her wings and be driven out for staying away from the court three days. Rashid ul Khairi was a leading figure in Urdu writing for and about women.
2 chapters · About 51 minutes of published text
لکھنؤ کا عہد شاہی
By خواجہ عبد الرؤوف عشرت لکھنوی
Three essays by Ishrat Lakhnavi look back at the royal era of Lucknow and Awadh. They describe the court, the rulers' religious tolerance, and the culture of the city under the kings.
3 chapters · About 29 minutes of published text
مذہب عشق معروف بہ قصہ گل بکاؤلی
By منشی نہال چند لاہوری
Nihal Chand Lahori's Mazhab-e-Ishq, better known as Gul-e-Bakawali (1803), is a Fort William College retelling of an older Persian romance. The blind king's sons must find the flower of Bakawali, a fairy queen, to bring back his sight, and the youngest, Taj-ul-Muluk, goes after it through a succession of tales.
26 chapters · About 171 minutes of published text
مقامات الحريري
By الحريري
Al-Hariri of Basra wrote these rhymed-prose episodes around 1100, and Arabic readers long held them among the finest prose in the language. In each, the narrator al-Harith ibn Hammam meets the beggar and trickster Abu Zayd of Saruj in a new town and is again amazed by his learning, his disguises and his gift for talking others out of their money. The book is both a set of comic tales and a showcase of the Arabic language.
49 chapters · About 192 minutes of published text
مقامات بديع الزمان الهمذاني
By بديع الزمان الهمذاني
The narrator repeatedly meets the eloquent wanderer Abu al-Fath al-Iskandari in scenes of disguise, wit, and deception. Al-Hamadhani's rhymed prose established the maqama as a major Arabic literary form.
51 chapters · About 88 minutes of published text