This study is a detailed examination of the competing notions of adab, a key concept in Islamic ethical tradition typically described as an amorphous combination of belles letters, propriety, and etiquette, through the example of the Urdu and Persian literary ecosystem from the late colonial to the early postcolonial period (1900-1990). It centers the careers of the Afghan poet Khalilullah Khalili (1907-1987), a staunch critic of the Soviet Union, and the Marxist Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984), and shows that the literary ecosystem in which they operated was a critical domain of Islamic ethics in the transformed knowledge politics of modern South Asia. My argument is that the literary ecosystem of modern Urdu and Persian poetry mediated religious ethics by combining classical textual traditions, practices of the body, and print and aural media. Furthermore, I develop the notion of a literary ecosystem, which I suggest, shifts the scholarly focus on adab from theories of ethics based on selves or inner states to malleable arrangements of specific Islamic knowledges and practices in colonial modernity. My broader contention in centering the religious materiality of poetry as a locus of tradition is to push back against the tendency that views Islamic genres of knowledge solely in logocentric terms, that is, either as a sequence of ideas or an arrangement of arguments. Instead, I present a tapestry of textual, corporeal, and historiographical practices in the making of Islamic adab in modernity. Against much poetry criticism, I frame poetry as an Islamic genre of knowledge whose place in modernity is greater than simply the unfortunate tale of a colonized tradition.