Hafez Shirazi

The greatest master of the Persian ghazal; a poet remembered by the epithets Lisan al-ghayb (Tongue of the Unseen) and Tarjuman al-asrar (Interpreter of Secrets). His full name is Khwaja Shams al-Din Muhammad Hafiz-i Shirazi; he received the epithet Hafiz because he memorised the Qur'an during his studies.

He was born in Shiraz; the dates given for his birth vary between 717 (1317) and 726 (1326). Despite his great fame very little is known about his life. Since he received a good education and used the title “Khwaja”, he must have belonged to a distinguished family. His father, thought to have been named Kamal al-Din or Baha al-Din, is said to have come to Shiraz from Kuhpaya near Isfahan, from Tuyserkan or from Hamadan; the generally accepted view is that his father's name was Baha al-Din and that he came to Shiraz from Kuhpaya in the Salghurid period. His mother was from Kazerun. According to the biographical anthologies, although he was the youngest of the brothers, when his father died he worked for a time in a bakery to support his impoverished family, and in these years developed a great love of study. He read al-Zamakhshari's al-Kashshaf, al-Sakkaki's Miftah al-'ulum, al-Mutarrizi's al-Misbah, al-Urmawi's Mafatih al-anwar and 'Adud al-Din al-Iji's al-Mawaqif; among his teachers were well-known scholars of Qur'anic recitation and jurisprudence such as Qiwam al-Din Abu al-Baqa. His poems show that alongside the religious sciences he acquired a very good literary culture, Arabic literature foremost, that he was informed about the music of his age and that he played chess well.

Most probably already known as a poet while still a student, he attached himself to Abu Ishaq, the last ruler of the Inju dynasty that ruled Shiraz in the years 1303-1357, and was probably granted a salary from the divan. He came under the influence of Abu Ishaq, who loved poetry and wine, and of the 'ayyars who had secured him his throne — the unconventional folk also called “rind”; the famous vineyards and gardens of Shiraz nourished this atmosphere. He was on close terms with Abu Ishaq and his vizier Hajji Qiwam al-Din; in this period his poems passed from hand to hand and from country to country, and his fame reached as far as Bengal in India. The days when Mubariz al-Din of the Muzaffarids, nicknamed “the muhtasib”, violently suppressed the disorder in Shiraz and banned even Sa'di's books were a period of which Hafiz too complained. Shah Shuja', who deposed his father, most probably employed him in the divan; thanks to his patron the vizier Qiwam al-Din he lived in prosperity. When Shah Shuja', at the prompting of the scholars of Kirman, took his father's path and had the vizier Qiwam al-Din killed, Hafiz went to Yazd and took refuge with Khwaja Jalal al-Din Turan Shah; not finding what he hoped for, he returned to Shiraz and through Turan Shah was reconciled with Shah Shuja'. Zayn al-'Abidin, who succeeded Shah Shuja', also treated him well, but on his death Hafiz's material circumstances declined. According to one account, when Timur took Shiraz and imposed new taxes, Hafiz was unable to pay even the small sum that fell to him; he appeared before Timur, and when the ruler recited the couplet “If that Shirazi Turk should take our heart captive, for the dark mole on her cheek I would bestow Samarkand and Bukhara” and asked “How can a man who gives Samarkand and Bukhara for a mole on his beloved's face be poor?”, he replied “It is through such generosity that we have come to this state”, won the ruler's sympathy and was spared the tax.

Although he had a connection with Sufism, the sources give no definite information about his order or his shaykh. The biographical anthologies record that he benefited from Sufis and scholars such as Shams al-Din 'Abdallah-i Shirazi, 'Imad-i Faqih-i Kirmani and al-Sayyid al-Sharif al-Jurjani, and that he met shaykhs such as Ni'matallah Wali, Khwaja Abu al-Wafa al-Baghdadi and Kamal-i Khujandi. The source considers it unlikely that Hafiz, who said that the path of truth cannot be travelled without a guide and who possessed a Sufi temperament, should not have attached himself to one of the shaykhs of his time.

Never again finding his former prosperity, Hafiz died in Shiraz in 791 (1389) or, more probably, in 792 (1390), and was buried in the quarter of Hafiziyya, where his tomb stands today. Only one of his ghazals contains expressions concerning the death of his wife, and one the death of a son. The ŞÎRAZ article counts his tomb, together with that of Sa'di-i Shirazi, among the noteworthy architectural monuments of the city.

His Circle of Influence — His Divan became known outside Iran in the Middle East, India, Turkey and some European countries; in Turkey it stands, after the Mathnawi and the Gulistan, at the head of the most widely read Persian texts and has an important place among the poems memorised in the teaching of Persian and rhetoric. Its influence on Turkish divan poetry was broad and lasting: in the XIVth and XVth centuries there are ghazals so close to Hafiz as to be called translations; this resemblance is plain in Şeyhi, is transformed by adaptations in Ahmed Paşa, while in Fuzuli the couplets in which it is clearly visible are few. Baki wrote Persian tahmis and parallel poems on his ghazals, and Nef'i has lines implying that to become a master one must overcome an obstacle such as Hafiz; Nedim and Şeyh Galib, though not influenced by him, offer parallel poems and lines of appreciation. Köprülü says that even the folk minstrels were not strangers to him. After the Tanzimat, Ziya Paşa writes in the preface to his Harabat that his horizons widened after reading Hafiz in his youth; in novels such as Namık Kemal's Cezmi and Ahmed Midhat's Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi the heroes read the Divan of Hafiz; in Abdülhak Hamid's Tayflar Geçidi and İlhan the ghost of Hafiz is among the characters. Mehmed Akif, through the preacher of “Süleymaniye Kürsüsünde”, complains that the Divan has become a book of fatwas licensing immorality; Yahya Kemal, in “Rindlerin Ölümü” (The Death of the Rinds), points to Hafiz's immortality. In the West, Goethe, who read Hafiz in Hammer's translation, published the lyrical-mystical poems he wrote under this influence, gathered in twelve books, as the West-östlicher Divan (Stuttgart 1819). The Divan has also been used as a book of divination: the person seeking an omen recites the formula “O Hafiz of Shiraz, you look upon us; I seek a secret, and you reveal every secret”, opens the Divan and draws conclusions about his own conduct from the ghazal on that page.

His Poetry and Sufi Line — Although he also wrote qasidas, ruba'is and fragments, he attained fame through his ghazals. Because he gathered in himself the merits of all the earlier masters of the ghazal, his ghazals are regarded as the most accomplished examples of the genre in Persian literature. Like the poets before him he sang of love and of wine gatherings that also carry figurative meanings, and sometimes scattered other poets' couplets among his own ghazals. Alongside harmony and fluency, the plain, unaffected and concise quality of his language is among the chief reasons for his fame; 'Abd al-Rahman Jami says that his ghazals equal in harmony the qasidas of Zahir-i Faryabi, that his style is close to that of Nizari-i Quhistani, but that no artificiality is to be seen in his poetry. In his ghazals, which contain every kind of scholarly, ethical and philosophical conceit, he used varied metres and did not smother meaning and expression with rhetorical devices; being much occupied with the divans of the Arab poets, he opened his ghazals, and especially his mulamma's, by addressing the beloved. Foremost among the poets who influenced him is Khwaju-yi Kirmani, who most probably spent his last years in Shiraz; Salman-i Savaji follows him, and the influence of Khayyam is also seen. He borrowed from Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, Sa'di-i Shirazi and Kamal al-Din-i Isfahani and wrote responses to their poems; yet whether parallel poem or borrowing, he set his own stamp on every poem he wrote.

His Works — Divan. Because Hafiz did not arrange his poems into a divan during his lifetime, the attribution of all these poems to him is a matter of dispute; until recently it was accepted that his poems were compiled by a person named Gulandam, referred to in the prefaces of the divan manuscripts only as “the compiler”. Three recently identified early manuscripts have shown that the compilation began while Hafiz was still alive; one of them is the Ayasofya manuscript in the Süleymaniye Library (no. 9945), copied in the years 813-814 (1410-1411) by order of Iskandar Mirza, another the British Museum manuscript (no. 7759), written by the same order. The committees that rulers such as Husayn Bayqara set up to re-establish the poems likewise failed to reach a definitive result. A manuscript dated 827 (1424) was first published by 'Abd al-Rahim Khalkhali; Muhammad Qazvini and Qasim Ghani produced a new edition based on this and nearly twenty older manuscripts; Parviz Natil Khanlari, Abu al-Qasim Anjavi, Jalal Na'ini and Nazir Ahmad, Iraj Afshar, Salim Naysari, Rashid 'Ayvazi and Akbar Bahruz are the Divan's other editors. Commentaries were written from the outset on poems that appear deceptively simple: the oldest is that of Muslihuddin Mustafa Sururi, followed by the Turkish commentaries of Şem'i and of Sudi Bosnevi, regarded as the most perfect; Sudi's commentary was translated into Persian by 'Ismat Sattarzada. The Mevlevi shaykh Mehmed Vehbi Konevi (d. 1244/1828) was the first to comment on the poems from a Sufi standpoint. The Divan was first translated in full into Turkish by Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı (Istanbul 1944); in the West, Joseph von Hammer's German translation (Stuttgart 1812-1813) is regarded as the most important, while Hermann Brockhaus, together with Sudi's commentary (Leipzig 1854-1860), H. Wilberforce Clarke (London 1891), Gertrude L. Bell (London 1897) and A. J. Arberry (Cambridge 1947) published English translations and selections.