Hafiz: The Tongue of the Unseen

Hafiz of Shiraz (Khwāja Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ-i Shīrāzī, c. 1315-1390) is the supreme master of the Persian ghazal and one of the most beloved poets the Islamic world has produced. In Persian-speaking households for six centuries his Divan has occupied a place next to the Qur’an: the Book of revelation in one hand, the book of inward speech in the other. The popular practice of fal-i Hafiz, “taking an augury from Hafiz” by opening the Divan at random for guidance, is itself a measure of the trust the tradition has placed in him. He is called Lisān al-Ghayb, “the Tongue of the Unseen,” for the precision with which his ghazals are felt to speak the inward state of the heart that hears them.

Hafiz did not formally enter a tariqa, as far as the record shows. He was a hafiz, a memoriser of the Qur’an (the title is his name’s source), a teacher of Qur’anic sciences in Shiraz, and a poet at the Muzaffarid and Injuid courts during a politically turbulent fourteenth century. His Sufism is the Sufism of the Persian adab-tradition: classical, allegorical, anchored in the Qur’an and the Prophet, in the line that runs from Bayazid Bistami through Sanā’ī, Attar, and Rumi. What he added to this tradition is a register: a crystalline, compressed lyric voice in which every line is at once formal courtly verse and inward instruction.

A Shiraz Life

Hafiz was born around 1315 in Shiraz, the city that would remain his home for almost the whole of his life. Shiraz in the fourteenth century was a centre of Persian culture and Sufi learning, periodically buffeted by the unstable politics of the post-Ilkhanid period. The Muzaffarid dynasty controlled Fars from the 1340s; Hafiz lived through the violent disputes of Mubāriz al-Dīn Muḥammad and his sons Shāh Shujāʿ and Shāh Manṣūr, and through the brief but terrifying visit of Timur in 1387.

He received the classical madrasa education of his time: Qur’anic memorisation (hence his title), Arabic grammar, Qur’anic sciences, and likely the standard Sufi texts. He was a muḥtasib’s son by some accounts; he taught Qur’an for a living; at various periods he was attached to a court, at others he was out of favour and lived quietly. The Muzaffarid Mubāriz al-Dīn was a religious literalist who closed the wine-taverns and persecuted Sufis; Hafiz’s lifelong critique of the zāhid, the surface-ascetic, was in part addressed to that court culture and its imitators.

He died around 1390 in Shiraz and was buried in the garden quarter that would become Hafezieh, today one of the most visited shrines in Iran. The marble tombstone bears two of his own ghazals.

The Divan

The Divan-i Hafiz contains some 500 ghazals, a few longer qasāʾid and masnavī pieces, and a small body of quatrains and fragments. It was compiled posthumously by Hafiz’s friend and student Muḥammad Gulandām; the manuscript tradition is extensive and a definitive critical text continues to be debated. The standard modern Persian editions are those of Khānlarī and Qazvīnī-Ghanī.

The Persian ghazal is a tightly bound form: a short lyric of usually seven to twelve couplets, all sharing a single rhyme (radif) and metre, opening with a couplet whose two halves rhyme, and closing with a couplet in which the poet names himself. Hafiz’s mastery of this form is the height of Persian lyric. Each ghazal is at once internally complete and structurally porous: the couplets can be read independently, yet the ghazal as a whole holds a sustained mood and an inner argument.

The vocabulary is the inherited vocabulary of Persian Sufi lyric: mey (wine), sāqī (cup-bearer), kharabāt (the ruin, the tavern), gulshan (the rose garden), bulbul (the nightingale), zulf (the beloved’s tress), khāl (the mole), pir-i mughān (the master of the Magians, the Sufi guide). The vocabulary is older than Hafiz; what Hafiz did was compress it into a form so finely worked that no later Persian poet has surpassed him.

The Wine and the Tavern

The wine of Hafiz is not the wine of the wine-shop. It is the wine of the classical Sufi allegorical lexicon that runs from Bayazid Bistami and Abū Saʿīd ibn Abī’l-Khayr in the tenth and eleventh centuries through Sanāʾī and ʿIrāqī into Hafiz’s own age. Within that lexicon:

• Mey / sharab: divine love, the mahabba of the Beloved that overwhelms the heart’s sober self-possession. The classical Sufi sources from Ghazali’s Ihya to Jāmī’s Lawāʾiḥ read the wine of Persian poetry consistently this way. Hafiz himself sometimes writes the equation directly into his couplets, lest a careless reader miss it.

• Sāqī: the giver of the wine, the divine source of love. Often the figure is the pīr, the Sufi master, who is the immediate vessel through which the wine reaches the disciple’s cup. Behind the pīr stands the Real.

• Kharabāt (the ruin / tavern): the heart of the lover, in which the sober self has been ruined so that the divine wine can be received. The kharabāt is not literally the wine-shop down the street. It is the inward station of one whose self-image has been broken open. The cognate concept is the kharab (ruin) of the nafs before fana.

• Pīr-i mughān (the master of the Magians): the Sufi guide, often given this archaic Zoroastrian title because the Magh (Magian) wine-seller of pre-Islamic Iran becomes, in Sufi lyric, the figure of the unfettered transmitter of divine love who stands at the margins of formal religion. The trope is symbolic, not theological: Hafiz is not a Zoroastrian sympathiser; he is using the inherited iconography of kharabāt poetry.

• The Beloved: at the deepest level, al-Ḥaqq, the Real. At intermediate levels, the pīr, the Prophet (ṣalla’llāhu ʿalayhi wa-sallam), the Beloved’s “tress” and “mole” being the jamāl (beauty) and jalāl (majesty) of the divine names.

This allegorical reading is not a later Sufi imposition on a secular Hafiz. Hafiz writes from inside the kharabāt lexicon as it had been built by the Persian Sufi tradition over four centuries. He inherits Sanāʾī, Attar, Rumi, Saʿdī, and the whole inheritance of Persian Sufi lyric. To read his ghazals as ordinary love poetry or table-songs is to mistake the surface for the substance.

Rind and Zahid

The two figures who animate the Divan are the rind and the zāhid.

The zāhid is the surface-ascetic, the man of religious form without religious substance. He prays publicly, wears the religious robe, advertises his piety, and is interiorly empty. His prayer is theatre, and his theatre is his prayer. The zāhid is Hafiz’s lifelong target.

The rind is the lover who has gone beyond the surface. He has been ruined by the wine of divine love and no longer needs the zāhid’s costume. The rind may pray with no one watching and pray better than the zāhid prays at the front of the mosque. He has surrendered the very thing the zāhid clings to: the image of piety. What remains is the inward act itself, performed without an audience and without need of one.

The rind is sometimes misread, in modern translations, as the antinomian rebel: the libertine who has thrown off religion. This is not Hafiz. The rind has not thrown off religion; the rind has gone inward through religion. Hafiz himself was a Qur’an-hafiz and prayed his five times daily; his critique of the zāhid is the critique that runs throughout the Sufi tradition from Hasan al-Basri and Rabia onward: that ostentatious piety is not piety, and that the heart’s secret is the only place the Real visits.

Mabin be-zhārī-i Ḥāfiz keh dar khirqa-i sajjāda Hizār pīrahan-i rind-i pārsā dārad.

Do not look down on the worn-out Hafiz, for under the prayer-mat cloak are a thousand shirts of the pious rind.

The line is signature Hafiz: the apparently ruined exterior is the cover for the inward life of the genuine lover; the apparently pious exterior of the zāhid hides nothing because nothing is there.

Hafiz and Rumi

Hafiz comes a generation after Rumi (1207-1273), in the same Persian Sufi-lyric tradition but in a different register. Rumi is spiral, ecstatic, gushing; the Masnavi’s twenty-five thousand couplets are a vast outpouring in which the same teaching is approached from a thousand angles. Hafiz is crystalline, compressed; a single ghazal of his can carry what Rumi might give five hundred couplets to develop.

The two voices are complementary. The Anatolian Sufi register that runs from Yunus Emre and Rumi forward in Turkish, and the Iranian Sufi register that runs from Sanāʾī through Hafiz and Jāmī in Persian, are the two great branches of the Sufi lyric. They sing the same teaching: divine love is the only intelligible centre, the heart is the seat of its reception, the path is service and inward attention, and the surface religion is empty without the inward fire. Hafiz says it in the form that takes one whole evening of attention to read one ghazal carefully. Rumi says it in the form that takes a whole life to read the Masnavi.

Persian devotional culture has long paired them: the Masnavi on one shelf, the Divan-i Hafiz on another, with the Qur’an above both.

Legacy

Hafiz’s influence is unusually wide. In the Persian-speaking world he is the national poet of Iran in a sense that no European country quite has an equivalent for: his lines saturate ordinary speech, his ghazals are sung in classical Persian music, fal-i Hafiz is performed at family gatherings, and his tomb at the Hafezieh in Shiraz is visited by tens of thousands every year.

Beyond Persia, his reception in European literature began with the German orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s 1812 translation of the Divan, which Goethe read with such impact that he composed his own West-östlicher Divan (1819) in response. Goethe writes: “Hafiz hat keinen Gleichen” : Hafiz has no equal. Through Goethe, Hafiz reached Emerson, Pushkin, Nietzsche, and the wider nineteenth-century Western literary imagination. He has been translated and re-translated in English by Gertrude Bell, A. J. Arberry, Dick Davis, Peter Avery, and many others.

The modern English diffusion of Hafiz through Daniel Ladinsky’s adaptations : widely circulated in spiritual-bookstore culture : has unfortunately introduced a great deal of material that does not correspond to any line in the actual Persian Divan. Readers who want Hafiz should reach for Dick Davis’s Faces of Love (with Jahan Malek Khatun and ʿObayd-e Zākānī), A. J. Arberry’s Fifty Poems of Hafiz, or Peter Avery’s The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz, all of which work from the Persian.

Place in the Tradition

Hafiz stands at the close of the great Persian Sufi-lyric line. After him the tradition continues with Jāmī (1414-1492) and the late classical poets, but Hafiz is the summit. His position in the Sufi inheritance is the position of one who has perfectly received the inherited lexicon and given it back to the tradition with the final degree of formal compression.

In the wider Sufi map, Hafiz represents the Persian lyric register as the great companion to the Anatolian register developed in the Yunus-Mevlana-Bayrami-Celveti chain. The two registers are not in competition; they are the two main currents in which the same classical Sunni-Sufi inheritance has been carried into the Turkish and Persian worlds. The site treats them in parallel.

The Tavern of Ruin, the famous symbol of Hafiz’s kharabāt, is treated in its own article; the present article gives Hafiz the figure his rightful place beside Rumi, Attar, and Sanāʾī in the Persian Sufi lineage.

Sources

• Khwāja Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ-i Shīrāzī, Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ; standard critical editions by Khānlarī (1980) and Qazvīnī-Ghanī (1941).
• Dick Davis, Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz (Penguin Classics, 2013).
• A. J. Arberry, Fifty Poems of Hafiz (Cambridge University Press, 1947).
• Peter Avery, The Collected Lyrics of Hafiz of Shiraz (Archetype, 2007).
• Leonard Lewisohn (ed.), Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry (I.B. Tauris, 2010).
• Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (UNC Press, 1975), chapters on Persian Sufi lyric.
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-östlicher Divan (1819).