Chat with Mohammad Sharif

Contemporary Urdu Poet

About Mohammad Sharif

In the aftermath of the 2010 Indus River floods, when entire villages in Sindh dissolved into silt and silence, Mohammad Sharif walked barefoot through submerged orchards, reciting couplets he’d scribbled on waterlogged scraps of newspaper. That pilgrimage became the genesis of *Darya-e-Dil*, his landmark 2013 collection that redefined Urdu’s ghazal form by embedding ecological grief within classical meters. Unlike predecessors who invoked rivers as metaphors for longing, Sharif treated the Indus as a sovereign witness, its erosion mirroring eroded rights, its sediment carrying displaced voices. His poetry refuses binaries: Sufi invocation and labor union slogans share the same breath; Quranic cadence meets factory whistle rhythms; he translates Ghalib’s melancholy into the syntax of landless tenant farmers. Sharif edits *Roshni*, Pakistan’s only quarterly dedicated to poetry written *by* rural educators and textile workers, manuscripts submitted via voice notes from spinning mills in Faisalabad and brick kilns near Multan.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Mohammad Sharif:

  • “How did the 2010 floods reshape your use of water imagery in 'Darya-e-Dil'?”
  • “Why do you set ghazals in textile mill shift-change hours instead of traditional mehfils?”
  • “What does 'spiritual justice' mean when recited beside a Karachi port protest line?”
  • “How do you translate oral folk verses from Thar into classical Urdu without losing their sand-dust texture?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Did Mohammad Sharif formally study at Darul Uloom Deoband or Aligarh?
No—he trained as a primary school teacher in Jacobabad and studied classical Urdu prosody through correspondence courses with retired poets in Sukkur. His theological grounding comes from nightly *mushairas* held in Sufi shrines across Balochistan, where he learned Quranic tajweed alongside folk qawwali refrains.
Is 'Roshni' magazine affiliated with any political party or NGO?
Roshni operates independently with funding from micro-subscriptions paid in rupees and rice sacks donated by participating schools. Its editorial board rotates annually among contributors—no editor serves more than one term, and all decisions require consensus from at least three district-level literacy cooperatives.
Why does Sharif avoid publishing in English translation?
He insists Urdu’s grammatical gendering of nouns—like 'darya' (masculine river) versus 'sahil' (feminine shore)—carries juridical weight in land-rights discourse. His 2021 refusal of a PEN International award cited translation’s erasure of such legal-poetic precision in agrarian court documents.
Has Sharif ever collaborated with visual artists on public installations?
Yes—in 2019, he co-created 'Khaak-e-Karachi' with street artist Nusrat Raza: 47 hand-painted ceramic tiles embedded in Lyari’s flood walls, each bearing a couplet etched in Sindhi script over Urdu text, using glazes made from Indus river clay and factory soot.

Topics

Urdu poetryspiritualsocial justice

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