Abdul Manan Bhat

Abdul Manan is a scholar of Islam, devotional literature, and material religion, specializing in Islamic discourses on poetry with a focus on the Persianate world. Urdu and Persian literature is at the heart of his teaching and research interests. At Harvard, Manan teaches courses on Urdu and Indo-Persian literatures, Sufism, and Islamic intellectual traditions. He is currently working on his first book project, Divine Craft: Poetry, Bodies, and Islam in Modernity, which rethinks the relationship between religious knowledge and literary practice from the early modern to the modern period in South and Central Asia. Building on his dissertation, this project engages diverse archival sites across Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Kashmiri. Manan received his PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (2025), where he was a Penn Presidential Fellow and later served as lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies.

Manan is also a practicing Urdu poet. He has recited poetry upon invitation at poetry readings (mushairas) across South Asia, North America and Europe. A number of his ghazals have been sung by prominent classical singers in South Asia. He writes under the pen name ʿAlam (banner). He was born and brought up in Kashmir.