Biography:
Shariq's academic research centers around literary and religious cultures in Islamicate South
Asia, with a focus on Persian and Urdu textual sources. His doctoral dissertation investigates the pre-modern and modern reception in South Asia of the Masnavi—a six-volume poetic work, famously known as the Qurʾān in Persian—of the thirteenth-century Persian poet Jalal al-Dīn Rūmī. The dissertation opens with the life and works of the seventeenth-century Mughal official and scholar ʿAbd al-Latīf ʿAbbāsī, and concludes with
the twentieth-century Persian and Urdu poet Muhammad Iqbal. In his work Shariq narrates the story of the many lives of the Masnavi in South Asia, and in doing so explore broader questions about the relationship between religion and aesthetics, the place of Persian poetic traditions in South Asian Islamic religiosity, and the role of poetry in fashioning South Asian responses to modernity.
Shariq has additional interests in Mughal cultural history; poetry and poetics; literary criticism in Urdu and English; post-coloniality; and the relationships between fiction and knowledge.