Hafez of Shiraz

Birth in Shiraz, c. 1320

Hafez was born in Shiraz around 1320 of the Common Era — the year is not certain to within half a decade, and modern scholars place it variously between 715 and 727 in the Hijri calendar. His father, Baha-ud-Din, was a coal-and-cloth merchant who had emigrated from Isfahan to Shiraz in search of better trade; his mother came from Kazerun, a market town west of Shiraz on the road toward the Persian Gulf coast.

At his birth Shiraz was already the most cultivated city in southern Iran. The Mongol invasions that had levelled Khorasan and Iraq a century earlier had largely spared Fars, thanks to the diplomatic skill of its Salghurid atabegs, and the city’s madrasas and Sufi gatherings had absorbed scholars who fled eastward from Baghdad and Bukhara. Saadi, the previous towering name in the Persian lyric, had died in Shiraz only a generation before Hafez’s birth, and his shrine — the Saadiyeh — was already a place of literary pilgrimage by the time the new boy was learning his alphabet.

Baha-ud-Din died while Hafez was still a child. The household, never wealthy, fell into the kind of precarious middling poverty that the early ghazals quietly remember: a poet who knows the names of the bakers and the prices in the bazaar but has eaten enough times at the patron’s table to have learned the language of the court.

Memorising the Quran

Persian biographical tradition records that Hafez attended the maktab — the neighbourhood elementary school — from his fourth or fifth year, and as he grew older read the standard madrasa curriculum of his century: Arabic grammar, jurisprudence, theology, Quranic exegesis, hadith, and the literary arts. His teachers included Qiwam al-Din Abdullah, a leading scholar of Shiraz in his day, in whose circle Hafez is said to have produced the lectures and glosses he refers to elsewhere as the labours of his student years.

Sometime before he turned twenty he had committed the entire Quran to memory in all of its standard recitations — fourteen variant qira’at, in the technical phrase — and on the strength of that achievement adopted the pen-name Hafez, "the keeper" or "the memoriser." The pen-name carries weight that English flattens. To be a hafez of the Quran in fourteenth-century Shiraz was to hold a religious credential as well as an intellectual one, and the way Hafez signs that name into the closing couplet of nearly every ghazal — sometimes humble, sometimes ironic, sometimes proud — is the running thread that holds together a Divan otherwise full of contradiction. The pen-name was, in a real sense, his first poem.

The court of Shah Abu Eshaq Inju, 1342–1357

Hafez’s early manhood coincided with the rule of Shah Abu Eshaq of the Inju dynasty, an admirer and patron of poets who took the young man under his protection. The Inju line had risen as deputies of the Mongol Ilkhans and ruled Fars and Isfahan as effective sovereigns once the Ilkhanate fragmented. Abu Eshaq inherited Shiraz from his elder brothers in 1342 and ruled the city for fifteen years — a period the Divan, looking back, treats as a single unrepeatable summer.

The king built libraries, employed calligraphers and miniaturists, kept a court of men of letters, and is described in several of Hafez’s ghazals as "the mirror of fortune" and "the radiance of Islam." Reciprocally, the poet learned the formal idiom of the panegyric and acquired the courtly polish that survived him into the harder years to come. These were also the years in which Hafez seems to have married and fathered children; one of his sons, named in the Divan as Shah Numan, predeceased him and is mourned in a famous elegy that gives one of the few unguarded glimpses of the poet behind the persona.

By the time the Muzaffarid armies of Kerman closed on Shiraz in 1353, however, the Inju order had begun to crack from within, and Abu Eshaq’s reign would not survive the decade.

Persecution under Mubariz al-Din Muhammad, 1357–1358

In 1357 the Muzaffarid prince Mubariz al-Din Muhammad — who had spent the previous fifteen years building a power-base in Yazd and Kerman — captured Shiraz and ordered Abu Eshaq’s execution in the public square. The new ruler was a man of austere Sunni piety in a city long accustomed to the liberal Sufi tolerance of the Inju decades. He closed the wine-houses, suppressed the musicians, dispatched a feared moral censor — the muhtasib — into the streets, and pressed the city’s mosques into a Hanafi puritanism foreign to its older temper.

For Hafez and his circle the change was personal: the patrons of the previous reign were either dead, in exile, or in hiding. The poetic record of these months contains the sharpest pages in the Divan. Hafez did not denounce the new order outright — to do so would have been suicide — but he developed instead an idiom of moral satire that has rarely been matched in the language. The hypocritical preacher who climbs the pulpit by day and drinks behind closed doors by night, the puritan censor whose own cellar would convict him, the dervish who sells piety as a profession: these enemies, rebuked through metaphor and ironic praise, became the permanent population of the late ghazals. Mubariz al-Din ruled Shiraz for less than two years.

Patronage of Shah Shoja, 1358–1384

In 1358 Mubariz al-Din’s own sons — Shah Shoja and Shah Mahmud — combined to depose and blind their father, an act of dynastic brutality that nevertheless reopened Shiraz to its older cosmopolitan life. Shah Shoja, who emerged from the brothers’ subsequent quarrels as the dominant figure, was himself a poet in Persian and Arabic and a confessed admirer of Hafez. Under his rule, which lasted until his death in 1384, Shiraz returned to the cultivated, indulgent register that the Inju decades had begun.

Wine returned to the bazaar; music returned to the gatherings; the muhtasib was returned to the bureaucracy and out of the streets. Hafez’s relationship with the new king was not unbroken — there were quarrels, brief estrangements, even a season when the poet seems to have left Shiraz for the south — but Shoja’s patronage gave him the working stability of a quarter-century in which to refine and circulate the Divan. Around the same time, his fame began to travel: invitations are recorded from the Bahmanid sultans of the Deccan, from the Jalayirid court at Tabriz, and from the rulers of Baghdad. Hafez declined them all. After Shoja’s death in 1384 his successor Zain al-Abidin retained the poet at court until Hafez’s own death five years later.

Death and the tafa’ol at his funeral

Hafez died in Shiraz around 1390, in his late sixties or early seventies. The most often-told story of his death does not concern the dying — about which the early sources say nothing precise — but the burial. According to a tradition recorded within decades of the event, a faction of religious zealots refused to let the poet be interred according to Muslim rites, citing the hundreds of references to wine, drunkenness, intoxication and the tavern that fill his Divan.

The dispute was settled by tafa’ol, the very practice that had grown up around the Divan in the poet’s own lifetime. His book was opened at random and the verse that came up was read aloud as Hafez’s last word in his own defence. The verse — "withhold not your step from Hafez’s bier; though drowned in sin, he goes to paradise" — silenced his accusers, and the poet was buried in the garden in northern Shiraz where his tomb still stands.

Whether the story is historically accurate or, as some modern scholars suspect, the kind of mythologising that gathers around a great poet within a generation, it captures something true about the world in which Hafez lived. The practice of consulting the Divan as a moral oracle was already underway in his own century, and his contemporaries already understood his work as something more than merely literary.

Hafezieh — the garden tomb

The garden where Hafez was buried lies a kilometre north of the old city walls of Shiraz. Originally a private orchard, it became a place of public pilgrimage almost immediately after the poet’s death; visitors are recorded by the late fifteenth century, when the Timurid governor Babur Mirza built a small dome over the grave.

The structure visible today is largely the work of two later patrons. In 1773 Karim Khan Zand, the founder of the Zand dynasty and a famously cultured ruler, restored the tomb and added a marble sarcophagus carved with two of Hafez’s own ghazals. In 1935 the French archaeologist André Godard, then heading the Persian government’s antiquities service, redesigned the site as the open pavilion that visitors see now: an octagonal stone canopy on eight slender columns, set in a formal garden of pools, cypresses and orange trees.

The site is called Hafezieh in modern Persian, the suffix -ieh giving it the same construction as the shrines of saints. Iranians describe a visit there as ziyarat — the word used for pilgrimage to a sacred sanctuary — and the choice of word alone says a great deal about Hafez’s place in the Iranian heart.

The Divan: 495 ghazals and beyond

The body of work that survives Hafez was not collected by his own hand. After his death his friend and student Muhammad Gulandam compiled the Divan from manuscripts gathered across Shiraz, and Gulandam’s preface remains one of the most important early sources on the poet’s life. The number of ghazals varies between manuscripts and editions; modern recensions count between four hundred and eighty and five hundred, and the figure four hundred and ninety-five used in this app and in many printed editions follows the standard Khanlari recension.

Around the ghazals stand a smaller body of other forms: a handful of qit’as (occasional verses), three or four qasidas (formal odes), three brief mathnavis (the longest of them the Saqi-nameh and the Mughanni-nameh, addressed to the wine-bearer and the singer respectively), and roughly forty robaiyyat. The ghazal is unmistakably the centre of gravity. Each ghazal is a self-contained lyric of seven to fifteen couplets unified by a single end-rhyme and metre, and signed in its closing couplet with the takhallus, the poet’s pen-name.

Hafez’s takhallus is unusually personal: sometimes humble ("poor Hafez"), sometimes proud ("Hafez whose verse the houris envy"), sometimes ironic. The way the name turns under his hand from one ghazal to the next is one of the lasting pleasures of the corpus. Persian literary tradition recognises Hafez as the master of the form. Saadi, two generations earlier, had perfected its tone; Hafez raised it to a polysemy that no later poet has equalled.

How to read Hafez

Hafez is famously plural. The same couplet can be read at three or four levels at once, and the great commentaries — beginning with the sixteenth-century Bosnian Ottoman jurist Sudi and continuing through the modern critical editions of Khanlari, Khorramshahi and Heravi — habitually annotate a single verse with several contradictory glosses.

The wine in his ghazals can be the wine of the tavern, the wine of mystic intoxication, or the wine of poetic inspiration. The beloved can be a real person, the Divine, the Prophet, the Sufi master, or the city of Shiraz itself. The pir-i mughan, the "Magian elder," can be a Zoroastrian wine-seller, a Sufi shaikh, a Christian priest of the road — and sometimes none of these. The hypocrisy he satirises is at once a particular fourteenth-century preacher and the universal type. The poet himself signed in this register: he called his ghazals "mysteries" and refused either to confirm or to deny the mystical reading, leaving each reader to make the choice that their own life made for them.

The custom of tafa’ol — opening the Divan at random for an omen — grew directly out of this hermeneutic openness. Any verse, applied to your own circumstances, will yield a meaning that is yours alone, and that, more than any single doctrine the poet ever signed his name to, is the deepest thing he is teaching.