The Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature hosted the launch of Towards the Pebbled Shore, a collection of essays by Dr. Syed Noman ul Haq, on Friday, September 12, 2025. The panel comprised Dr. Syed Noman ul Haq, Dr. Uzma Zareen Nazia, and Bilal Tanweer, with Dr. Ali Usman Qasmi moderating the session. In his opening remarks, Dr. Qasmi introduced Dr. Haq’s intellectual journey, situating him as a towering intellectual whose erudition and mentorship have inspired generations of students from diverse academic backgrounds. He noted in particular how Dr. Haq has nurtured a renewed passion for Persian and classical languages among students. 

Following this introduction, Bilal Tanweer spoke at length about his personal and intellectual encounters with Dr. Haq, drawing on his essay included in the volume. He recalled his first experience of listening to Dr. Haq at LUMS nearly two decades ago, where a lecture on Ibn Khaldun unexpectedly transformed into a profound intellectual encounter. What could have been an esoteric subject became, in Tanweer’s words, “an urgent encounter” with the Islamic intellectual heritage—one that awakened a deep hunger for knowledge he had not realized he carried.

In his reflections, Tanweer also drew attention to one of the central concerns of Dr. Haq’s scholarship as represented in the volume: the “literary sport of metaphor” that characterizes classical Urdu poetry. He elaborated on Dr. Haq’s argument in the essay “Continuous Poetic Creation”, where Urdu poetry is seen as a space of continuous metaphor-making—a creative process that transforms the real into the metaphorical and the metaphorical back into the real. Tanweer emphasized how this aesthetic sport, exemplified in the works of Ghalib and Faiz, not only distinguishes Urdu poetry from other traditions but also explains the resilience of the ghazal form across centuries. By revisiting these intricate metaphorical structures, Tanweer suggested, Dr. Haq provides a vocabulary to understand why Urdu’s poetic imagination continues to feel both classical and modern, deeply rooted yet perpetually generative.

Dr. Uzma Zareen Nazia followed with her reflections, situating the book within a broader cultural and literary frame. She highlighted how the text resonates with the poetry of Masood Saad Suleman, especially his verses on Lahore, which echo themes of space, belonging, and memory. She noted the vastness of Towards the Pebbled Shore, pointing out the way it accommodates multiple languages, voices, and cultural nuances within a single volume. In doing so, it mirrors the pluralistic inheritance of South Asian literary traditions. Dr. Uzma also spoke eloquently on the Sabk-e-Hindi style, quoting Persian couplets from the book and unpacking their layered meanings for the audience. Her commentary underscored how Dr. Haq’s essays reanimate the richness of Indo-Persian poetics for contemporary readers.

In his concluding remarks, Dr. Noman ul Haq himself reflected on the poetics of Urdu poetry in relation to philosophy, language, and tradition. He reflected on the binary of the logical and the ontological, suggesting that while metaphors in Urdu poetry are codified, systematized, and rationalized by tradition in a logical sense, they simultaneously carry an ontological depth, shaping modes of being and experience. Once canonized, these metaphors are reinforced and transmitted through tradition in a manner reminiscent of Foucauldian discourse formation, where structures of knowledge both constrain and enable the imagination with authority vested in the expert who legitimizes and perpetuates these forms. This continuity, he suggested, demonstrates both the constraints and the generative possibilities of literary convention. Turning towards the present, Dr. Haq drew connections between the inherited richness of classical poetics and the modern world, observing how the legacies of Arab and Western civilizations alike find their way into contemporary thought and expression.

The event thus illuminated Towards the Pebbled Shore not only as a collection of essays but as a testament to the living continuity of humanistic inquiry regarding classical traditions, modern intellectual debates, and cultural multiplicities.