Such ghazals are called "ġair-muraddaf" ghazal. * In South Asian languages some ghazals do not have any radif. Ghazals also exist, for example in the Pashtu, Kashmiri, Gujarati and Marathi languages. * Ghazal is simply the name of a form, and is not language-specific. * All the couplets, and each line of each couplet, must share the same meter. * There can be no enjambement across the couplets in a strict ghazal each couplet must be a complete sentence (or several sentences) in itself. In the first couplet, which introduces the theme, both lines end in the rhyme and refrain so that the ghazal's rhyme scheme is AA BA CA etc * The second line of each couplet (or sher) in a ghazal usually ends with the repetition of a refrain of one or a few words, known as a radif (pronounced Radeef), preceded by a rhyme known as the qaafiyaa. * A ghazal is composed of couplets, five or more. In some modernized ghazals the poet's name is featured somewhere in the last verse. The Kashmiri- American poet Agha Shahid Ali was a proponent of the form, both in English and in other languages he edited a volume of "real ghazals in English." Through the influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the ghazal became very popular in Germany in the 19th century, and the form was used extensively by Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866) and August von Platen (1796–1835). Ghazals were written by the Persian mystics and poets Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi (13th century) and Hafez (14th century), the Azeri poet Fuzuli (16th century), as well as Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869) and Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), who both wrote Ghazals in Persian and Urdu. Although the ghazal is most prominently a form of Urdu poetry, today, it is found in the poetry of many languages. Exotic to the region, as is indicated by the very sounds of the name itself when properly pronounced as ġazal, with its very un-Indic initial voiced velar fricative "g".
The ghazal spread into South Asia in the 12th century under the influence of the new Islamic Sultanate courts and Sufi mystics. It is one of the principal poetic forms the Indo-Perso-Arabic civilization offered to the eastern Islamic world. In its style and content it is a genre which has proved capable of an extraordinary variety of expression around its central themes of love and separation. The structural requirements of the ghazal are similar in stringency to those of the Petrarcan sonnet. It is derived from the Arabian panegyric qasida. The form is ancient, originating in 6th century pre-Islamic Arabic verse. A ghazal may be understood as a poetic expression of both the pain of loss or separation and the beauty of love in spite of that pain. The Arabic word "ghazal" is pronounced roughly like the English word "guzzle", but with the first, g-like consonant further back in the throat. In poetry, the ghazal ( Arabic/ Persian/ Urdu: غزل Hindi: ग़ज़ल Turkish "gazel") is a poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets and a refrain.