News at Eleven: The poetry reflects this suspension,

and is influenced by poets from both European and Muslim traditions from Coleridge and Keats to Hafiz and Rumi. There is also a strong influence from the great poets of Muslim South Asia, Ghalib and Iqbal.

Where the structure and meter of the poetry sometimes evoke the great English poets, [Akbar] Ahmed also uses classic Islamic poetic techniques to great effect. The scholar Roger Boase, who wrote on the poetry of Muslim Spain, characterized the Muslim poet of that era as a "jeweler with words, seeking the means of verbal images to fix and thereby eternalize a fleeting experience of joy or sadness or aesthetic delight."

from The Washington Post: On Faith: Guest Voices: Poetry, faith, and the Muslim soul

~~~~~~~~~~~