ḤĀFIẒ SHĪRĀZĪ

ḤᾹFIẒ SHĪRᾹZĪ (ah c. 726–792/c. 1326–1390 ce), in fuller form Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ-i Shīrāzī, was a Persian lyric poet and panegyrist, supreme master of the ghazal. He was born in Shīrāz, spent the greater part of his life in the area, and died there as well; his tomb is now a showplace. Much of his career was in the service or the ambiance of a minor dynasty, the Muzaffarids, whose overall reign was approximately coeval with his own life-span. As usual with Persian literary figures, Ḥāfiẓ's exact dates and the details of his life are much disputed: The traditional biography leans heavily on anecdotal pieties, casual references in a variety of sources, and possible allusions in his own corpus, the text of which is still far from being in a definitive form.

He is said to have had an impoverished childhood, part of it as an orphan, and to have worked at various menial tasks, but in the culture of the time these circumstances were no obstacle to his acquiring a sound education in the traditional disciplines. His pen name, Ḥāfiẓ, ostensibly signifies that he had memorized the Qurʾān, and his poetry itself displays a confident acquaintance with Arabic, the so-called Islamic sciences, various branches of secular knowledge, and Persian literature to his own day. By the age of thirty he appears to have gained some acceptance as a panegyrist to princes and influential ministers of state, and he continued thus—with various vicissitudes of fortune—for most of his life. At no time, however, does he seem to have enjoyed a regular appointment or any considerable wealth. Indeed, because some of his patrons were rigidly orthodox Sunnīs, his generally libertine and laissez-faire attitudes—whether actual or merely professed—often landed him in a measure of disgrace, if not in outright persecution.

It has sometimes been suggested, and as often denied, that Ḥāfiẓ was even of Shīʿī allegiance, and certainly various passages in the poems can be read in this sense. Nor, in the light of modern scholarship, would his celebrated Ṣūfī leanings necessarily conflict with such loyalties. The precise truth can hardly be discovered at this date, especially because ambiguity is in the nature of the case for any poet beholden to an establishment: In this case, Ḥāfiẓ would have had to be extremely ambiguous in his poetry in order to avoid offending various religious, political, or social interests. What seems clear, however, is that he generally carried, and made frequent reference to, a reputation for aggressive nonconformity.

Ḥāfiẓ's unique literary position rests on his Dīvān, the collection of his poems, practically all in the ghazal form (a sort of ode, ranging from a few monorhyming couplets to twelve, fifteen, or more). Unfortunately, no more than a few brief excerpts in translation can be cited here, but perhaps these opening lines from three separate ghazal s will give the reader a sense of Ḥāfiẓ's work:

If that Shīrāzī Turk will take my heart into his hand
I'll give up, for his Indian beauty spot, all Samarkand and Bukhara.

The green fields of heaven I saw and the new moon's sickle
And I was minded of what I'd sown and the reaping day to come.

I'll hold not my hand from wanting till my desire is realized;
Either my body attains my heart's beloved, or my heart will leave my body.

Ḥāfiẓ is said to have produced his own definitive recension some twenty years before his death, but no manuscript of this has ever come to light (and given the constant wear and tear on this particular poet's work over the centuries, it seems unlikely that any ever will). All known versions are believed to depend on an edition allegedly produced at some point after his death by a disciple. Whatever Ḥāfiẓ's own intentions may have been (at an earlier date or at various later times), the actual textual situation, quite apart from variant readings, is extraordinarily chaotic. In the thousands of extant manuscripts from all periods and places, and consequently in the more than a hundred printed editions, the number of poems ranges from about five hundred to almost one thousand, although the lower figures are commonly taken to be the more reliable. Moreover, in these recensions the order and number of lines in any particular poem can vary greatly, with virtually only the first (the internally rhymed quote-line) and the last (containing the poet's name) remaining stable. This is not at all abnormal in classical Persian poetry, where each line is designed to have a degree of self-containment and "finish" unfamiliar in Western literatures. What is unusual in the present case is the extent of variability, and this feature has given rise to a whole critical literature in its own right. Other factors of confusion are the idiosyncratic cultural tendencies for lesser poets to father their works onto famous names, or for all writers to borrow freely from each other where a line or two may seem particularly apt. Nor, in a culture where memory and oral tradition also play an important part, can the standard methods of scholarship (the oldest manuscript is normally the best, the simplest solution is likely to be wrong, and so forth) be applied with full confidence. In short, the text as it stands is neither authoritative in itself nor reliable in its possible relationship to the poet's life, and it may never become so.

Once this is said, and the rich (but often falsely romantic) accretions draped around the figure of Ḥāfiẓ in Western renderings have been stripped away as far as possible, one is still left with a body of poetic utterance that is regarded by Persian-speakers as sublime to the point of near-sacredness. Ḥāfiẓ's Dīvān is read or memorized, and quoted, at all levels of society, but it is also used—by those who call it a "Qurʾān in Persian"—in all solemnity to take random auguries at such important moments in life as a projected marriage, a business or medical decision, the start of a lengthy journey, and so on. Persian-speakers may or may not fully appreciate the linguistic and literary mastery Ḥāfiẓ constantly displays; they may not always relish his ambiguities and the alternating and interpenetrating themes—mystical, melancholy, pessimistic, hedonistic, or panegyric—but they all believe they hear in him a voice of infinite wisdom and transcendence. Nor does this apply only to those whose usual language or mother tongue is Persian, for Ḥāfiẓ was for centuries as revered in regions where Turkish (the Ottoman Empire) and Urdu (various princely states of India) were the local languages. Indeed, many of the best earlier studies, translations, and commentaries have emanated from those centers, because Iranian scholarship as such in Ḥafiziana is largely a twentieth-century development and is in some degree indebted to these as well as to the West.

Bibliography

Ḥāfiẓ naturally receives major and special treatment in the standard reference works, including both editions of The Encyclopaedia of Islam (different articles) and the several Western histories of Persian literature. Editions in Persian (none of them fully satisfactory) are numerous, while studies on him and translations of many of the poems abound in most Western languages. Unfortunately, a high proportion of the latter are of indifferent scholarly quality or make no claim to be more than popular and imaginative reworkings; most of them are in any case long since out of print. Some of the best critical studies are recent ones in Persian, and these have not been translated.

Two useful and accessible works are Michael C. Hillmann's Unity in the Ghazals of Hafez, Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures, no. 6 (Minneapolis, 1976), and A. J. Arberry's Fifty Poems of Ḥāfiẓ, rev. ed. (Cambridge, U.K., 1962). Both of these include bibliographies, and Hillmann's is comprehensive.

G. M. Wickens (1987)