Hafez

Hafez, in full Khajeh Shams-od-Din Mohammad Hafez-e Shirazi, was a Persian lyric poet who spent his life in Shiraz, in southern Iran, during the turbulent 14th century. His collected poems, the Divan, are made up mostly of ghazals, short lyrics about love, wine, the beloved and religious hypocrisy that can be read at once as earthly and mystical. He is the most popular poet in Iran, where his verses are quoted as proverbs and his book is found in almost every home.

Very little is known for certain about his life, and much of what was later written about him is legend. He was born in Shiraz, probably between about 1315 and 1325; modern scholars have proposed 1315, 1317 and 1320. He learned the Quran by heart as a boy, which earned him the title hafez, "one who has memorised the Quran", the name he later used as a poet.

Shiraz was the capital of the province of Fars, and in Hafez's lifetime it changed hands repeatedly as the Ilkhanate, the Mongol state that had ruled Iran, broke apart into rival local dynasties. He won patronage from a series of these rulers: Shah Abu Ishaq, who came to power when the poet was in his teens; the severe Mubariz al-Din Muhammad of the Muzaffarid dynasty; and above all Mubariz's son Shah Shuja, under whose long reign his work flourished. A story that he quarrelled with Shah Shuja and fled to Isfahan and Yazd has no firm historical support. He also exchanged letters and verses with the sultan of Bengal, Ghiyasuddin Azam Shah, who invited him to his court, though Hafez never made the journey.

Later tradition surrounded him with stories. One says he worked as a baker's delivery boy, fell hopelessly in love with a beautiful woman called Shakh-e Nabat, and turned his longing into a search for union with God under a Sufi master. Another tells that the conqueror Tamerlane, whose power reached Shiraz near the end of the poet's life, summoned him to explain a famous couplet offering Samarkand and Bukhara in exchange for the mole on a Shirazi beauty's cheek. Hafez, the story goes, answered with a joke about his own poverty and was sent away with gifts. Such tales cannot be verified.

He died in Shiraz around 1390, the year given by the 15th-century poet Jami, though some sources prefer 1389. A tomb was built for him in the Musalla gardens about twenty years later; the present mausoleum dates from the late 1930s.

Hafez wrote chiefly in the ghazal, a form of rhymed couplets that Persian poets had long used for love poetry with mystical undertones. His poems are famous for their layered imagery and puns, in which a single word may carry two meanings at once, so that a couplet can be read as a lover addressing the beloved, a courtier addressing a prince, or a seeker addressing God. Running through them is an ironic attack on the hypocrisy of preachers, judges and officials, often thought to be aimed at the puritanical rule of Mubariz al-Din. Wine, taverns and Zoroastrian imagery appear freely. There is no definitive edition: manuscripts contain anything from 573 to 994 poems, and leading modern editions accept fewer than 500 ghazals.

Hafez was admired across the Persian-speaking world in his own time. In modern Iran, families open his Divan at random during Nowruz or Yalda night to read their fortunes, his ghazals are central to classical Persian singing, and 12 October is celebrated as Hafez Day.

European translation began in the 17th century, and William Jones put him into English in 1771. He deeply impressed Goethe, as well as Emerson, Thoreau and Yeats, and Rabindranath Tagore visited his tomb in 1932. Scholars still debate how far his wine and love imagery should be read literally or mystically; many conclude the two cannot be separated.

Our 1300 map shows the Ilkhanate before its collapse, and the 1400 map shows Iran within the Timurid Empire after Tamerlane's conquests, a decade or so after the poet's death.