The poetics of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai offer a uniquely rich corpus through which students can explore fundamental human questions, love, loss, exile, ethics, ecology, gender, and resistance, across literary, philosophical, and performative domains. His Shah Jo Risālo operates simultaneously as poetry, moral philosophy, ecological thought, and oral archive, making it particularly suitable for comparative analysis alongside global traditions such as Sufism and Bhakti, feminist ethics, environmental humanities, sound studies, and decolonial thought. Thus, the proposed course may move beyond hagiographic or purely devotional readings, and it should position Shah Latif as a vernacular poet-philosopher and global thinker whose work speaks powerfully to contemporary concerns, including the climate crisis, displacement, indigeneity, and the politics of belonging. By engaging texts, translations, music (Shah Jo Rāg), and digital afterlives, the course aligns closely with Habib University’s commitment to critical pedagogy, multilingualism, and South Asian knowledge production.
The thematic outline for the proposed course focuses on the poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai and the need to treat Shah Latif as a thinker, ethicist, and cultural theorist, rather than solely as a devotional poet. Together, these themes allow the course to treat Shah Latif as theory-producing, not derivative, integrate text, sound, body, and place, align with Habib University’s commitment to comparative, critical, and decolonial humanities, and engage students ethically, intellectually, and creatively. I hope this course will enable students to encounter Shah Latif not as a cultural artifact, but as a living interlocutor in global humanistic debates.
