Ḥāfiẓ

Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad, known as Ḥāfiẓ, lived in Shiraz, in southern Iran, in the fourteenth century. His pen name means one who knows the Qurʾān by heart. He received a religious and literary education, and is said to have worked as a teacher of the Qurʾān and to have enjoyed, and lost, the favour of the successive rulers of Shiraz. He died around 1390, and his tomb in Shiraz is still visited by many.

He is the supreme master of the ghazal, the Persian lyric of love. His Dīvān, compiled after his death, contains about five hundred poems. Their images, of wine and the tavern, the beloved, the rose and the nightingale, and the hypocrisy of the outwardly pious, can be read as the language of earthly love and pleasure, or as the established symbols of Sufi poetry for divine love and spiritual intoxication. Most readers have found both meanings at once, and the ambiguity is part of their power.

In Iran his Dīvān is in almost every home, and is opened at random for guidance. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s German translation inspired Goethe’s West-Eastern Divan (1819), and Emerson, among others, translated him into English.