Naat
Quick answer: Naat is poetry in praise of the Prophet Muhammad, a devotional genre loved across Urdu, Persian and Arabic traditions. Explore its history and conventions.
A naat is a poem in praise of the Prophet Muhammad, one of the most widely practised devotional genres in Urdu, Persian, Arabic, Punjabi and Turkish poetry. The Arabic word means description or praise. Where a hamd praises God, the naat turns to the Prophet, dwelling on his mercy, his conduct and the love his community bears him, and by convention it follows the hamd at the opening of a classical collection or performance.
Naat is a living oral art as much as a literary one. Reciters known as naat khwans perform at gatherings, and a moving recitation can carry an audience the way a great song does. For students of world poetry, the genre shows how devotion, craft and performance braid together in the Islamic literary tradition.
Conventions and Tone
The naat's central discipline is balance: love expressed at full strength while respect keeps the language within careful bounds. Poets praise through episodes of the Prophet's life, his gentleness, his poverty of possessions, his weeping for his community, and through the changed lives of those who love him. The register is intimate but never casual. Many naats adopt ghazal or qasida form, so the genre is defined by subject and attitude rather than stanza shape.
Landmarks of the Genre
The thirteenth-century Qasida Burda, the Poem of the Mantle by the Egyptian poet al-Busiri, is the most recited praise poem in the Muslim world, memorised from Morocco to Malaysia. In Urdu, Ahmed Raza Khan's naats set a standard of devotional finesse that reciters still perform, and poets as canonical as Iqbal wrote in the genre. Persian literature salts its masnavis with naat sections directly after the hamd, so readers of Nizami or Attar meet the form whether they seek it or not.
Craft Lessons for Any Poet
Writing praise for a subject the audience already reveres is technically hard: nothing new can be claimed, so everything depends on angle and image. Naat poets solve this by shrinking the frame, praising the dust of a street the beloved walked, the well he drank from, the camel that carried him. An invented line in this spirit: 'Even the thorn bush by that road grew careful with its shadows.' Indirection, in praise as in elegy, is the professional's tool.
What poets can take from this
- Praise by way of small, oblique details; the grand statements have all been made already.
- Keep the register consistent; one casual phrase can puncture a devotional poem's whole fabric.
- Listen to naat recitation to understand how the lines are built for the voice.
- Study the Qasida Burda in translation as the genre's most influential single model.
- If you write outside this faith tradition, read naat for technique: reverence managed with craft.
Try it yourself
Choose a person you revere and write a praise poem that never describes them directly, praising only the places, objects and people their presence changed.
Questions
What is the difference between naat and hamd?
A hamd praises God and a naat praises the Prophet Muhammad. They usually appear in that order at the start of classical collections and devotional performances.
Does a naat follow a fixed poetic form?
No. Naats are written as ghazals, qasidas, nazms and songs. The genre is defined by its subject and its tone of loving respect, not by any particular rhyme scheme.
What is a naat khwan?
A naat khwan is a reciter who performs naats at religious and cultural gatherings. The recitation tradition is central to the genre; many famous naats are known primarily through beloved performances.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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