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Faith & Spirit Quote by Alisher Navoi

"Insofar as the world was created without the possibility for man to achieve his desires, God should create the world anew, according to peoples' wishes"

About this Quote

Navoi turns a complaint about human frustration into something far more radical: a demand that creation itself answer to human longing. For a 15th-century poet writing within a deeply religious world, that is a startling piece of imaginative audacity. He is not merely mourning the gap between desire and reality. He is testing the limits of what can be said about divine order, and doing it in the elevated language of poetic wish rather than outright heresy.

What makes the line work is its deliberate imbalance. God creates the world; people suffer its insufficiencies; therefore God should remake it "according to peoples' wishes". The logic is almost insolent, but the tone carries longing more than rebellion. Navoi gives voice to a profoundly human grievance: if existence is structured so that our deepest desires remain unattainable, then the fault lies not only in us, but in the design. That shift matters. It relocates disappointment from personal weakness to cosmic architecture.

In context, Navoi often wrote about love, justice, ethics, and the soul's restlessness in a Persianate and Turkic literary tradition steeped in Sufi symbolism. Desire here can be read on multiple levels at once: romantic, spiritual, social. The beloved may be unattainable, but so is perfect justice, perfect fulfillment, perfect union with the divine. The line's power comes from that layered ambiguity.

Its subtext is not naive utopianism. It is a poetic indictment of a world arranged around lack. Navoi transforms yearning into critique, and critique into a daring vision of a reality answerable to human need.

Quote Details

TopicGod
SourceQuoted on Goodreads, attributed to Twenty-one Ghazals by Alisher Navoiy, translated by Dennis Daly, 2016
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Navoi, Alisher. (2026, March 8). Insofar as the world was created without the possibility for man to achieve his desires, God should create the world anew, according to peoples' wishes. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/insofar-as-the-world-was-created-without-the-185747/

Chicago Style
Navoi, Alisher. "Insofar as the world was created without the possibility for man to achieve his desires, God should create the world anew, according to peoples' wishes." FixQuotes. March 8, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/insofar-as-the-world-was-created-without-the-185747/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Insofar as the world was created without the possibility for man to achieve his desires, God should create the world anew, according to peoples' wishes." FixQuotes, 8 Mar. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/insofar-as-the-world-was-created-without-the-185747/. Accessed 8 Mar. 2026.

More Quotes by Alisher Add to List
Navoi on Remaking Creation: Desire, Divine Order, and Longing
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About the Author

Alisher Navoi

Alisher Navoi (February 9, 1441 - January 3, 1501) was a Poet from Uzbekistan.

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