Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ

Khwāja Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad — named Ḥāfiẓ · حَافِظ (“he who knows by heart,” because he knew the whole of the Quran by heart) — is the greatest lyric poet of the Persian language. No name, in Iran, is more loved. His tomb in Shiraz, in a garden of roses, is the most visited place of pilgrimage in the country — well before the mosque of Imam Reza.

The rooted poet

Ḥāfiẓ was born in Shiraz into a humble family around 1320. He would live there all his life, leaving it only once — a planned voyage to India abandoned at the very moment of embarkation, when a storm made him understand that his place was in his native city. This fidelity to Shiraz is inscribed in his work: the city, its gardens, its climate, its passions, are the weave of his poems.

Raised in a mystical atmosphere — his father died young, his mother and his brother pushed him toward studies — he learned the Quran by heart, then studied law, theology, astrology. But his vocation was elsewhere: it was the ghazal · غَزَل, the lyric love poem, that seized him. At twenty, he began to compose.

The ghazal carried to its perfection

The ghazal is a short form — seven to fifteen couplets, on a regular metre, with a single rhyme repeated at the end of each second hemistich. Before Ḥāfiẓ, the mystical ghazal had already been practised by Rūmī, by Saʿdī (fellow citizen and immediate predecessor in Shiraz), by Anvarī. But Ḥāfiẓ carries it to a summit of art that no one after him would attain.

His particularity is deliberate ambiguity. Each ghazal can be read on several levels:

• A human love, carnal, for a precise beauty — a cupbearer boy, a woman met at the court.
• A mystical love for God — the Beloved designated under a veil.
• A satire of religious hypocrisies — mockeries of vain shaykhs, of narrow jurists.
• A meditation on time that passes, beauty that withers, death that comes.

Ḥāfiẓ never settles the matter. When he says “pour me wine,” it is sometimes true wine (his city was renowned for its vineyards), sometimes the spiritual wine of divine knowledge, sometimes the mystical metaphor of ravishment. This polysemy is his genius — each reader, at each rereading, finds a new meaning.

The Divan

The great symbol of wine

Wine (mey · مَی in Persian) is the central image of Ḥāfiẓ. Real wine, certainly — but above all, mystical wine. For one who knows how to read, the cupbearer (sāqī) is God who pours the teaching to the thirsty; the tavern (meykhāne) is the place of inner revelation; intoxication (masti) is mystical ecstasy; and the drinker is the divine lover who can no longer contain himself.

This allegory of wine is not an invention of Ḥāfiẓ — it comes from Ibn al-Fāriḍ, from Rūmī, from the Arab Sufis. But Ḥāfiẓ gives it an incomparable intensity and finesse. And the contradiction it arouses — between the Quranic prohibition of wine and its poetic praise — becomes, for him, the very mainspring of spirituality: one must dare to surpass the letter in order to rejoin the spirit.

A work that stirs the community

The audacity of Ḥāfiẓ did not please everyone. Several jurists of his time wished to trouble him — to accuse him of really drinking wine, of frequenting places of ill repute, of mocking religion. His protection came from local princes who loved his poems: the sultan Shāh Shujāʿ first, then the prince Manṣūr.

When Ḥāfiẓ died in 1389, the religious authorities even refused to bury him in a Muslim cemetery. The inhabitants of Shiraz, indignant, proposed a compromise: let us open his Divan at random, and if the verse drawn is edifying, let him be buried as a believer. The lot fell upon this couplet:

The sentence appeared sufficient. Ḥāfiẓ was buried with honours in what is today the Ḥāfiẓiyeh — his mausoleum, made garden and place of poetry. The Persian tradition of the fāl-i Ḥāfiẓ — to draw one's fate by opening the Divan at random — was born of this episode and endures still today in every Iranian household.

The rose and the nightingale

Beyond wine, two other figures run through the work: the rose (gol) and the nightingale (bolbol). The rose is the ephemeral beauty of the world, the fragile beloved, in the last analysis God Himself who manifests Himself in beauty. The nightingale is the lover — who sings without respite his love for the rose, without being able to possess her.

This image — the eternal lover who sings his love without attaining the object — says, for Ḥāfiẓ, the human condition itself. We are the nightingales who sing their nostalgia. And this song is, already, a form of union. The nightingale who loves the rose is no longer separated from her; it inhabits her through its song.

The universal influence

No other Persian poet, perhaps, has had so enduring an influence. Ḥāfiẓ has shaped the whole Iranian literary sensibility — nearly every verse that resounds in the Persian language owes something to him. Further, his influence touches Mughal India (where he is abundantly imitated), Ottoman Turkey (the sultan Selim I devoted a princely edition to him), and later Europe.

In the nineteenth century, Goethe discovered Ḥāfiẓ through the German translation of Hammer-Purgstall and was overwhelmed by it. He composed in response the West-östlicher Divan (“Divan of West and East,” 1819) — a spiritual dialogue across the distance between the German poet and his Persian brother. For Goethe, Ḥāfiẓ is a “twin” — a man who knew how, in other words, to say the same truths.

Ḥāfiẓ resembles no one — and no one resembles him.
He is unique in the world, as the moon is unique in the sky. Goethe, West-östlicher Divan

Saint or poet?

A last question haunts the posterity: was Ḥāfiẓ a Sufi saint, or a poet who skilfully wielded the mystical vocabulary? This question is probably ill posed. Ḥāfiẓ was never formally affiliated to a brotherhood; he had no disciples; he wrote no doctrinal treatise.

But his poems bear witness to an inner knowledge that cannot be feigned. And the Iranian tradition, for seven centuries, has unanimously considered him a ʿārif · عَارِف — a gnostic, a knower. His tomb is visited as that of a saint. And no lover of his poetry can, after long frequenting it, doubt that its author knew, in his own manner, the ravishment of which he speaks.

Whoever has once felt upon his lips the taste of the wine of Ḥāfiẓ
can never again drink from other cups. Persian adage