Download Soroush Dabbagh's Lectures on Hafez

Khwāja Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad, Ḥāfiẓ of Shiraz, is one of the greatest subtle-tongued poets of Iran and one of the eminent bards of the world, who adopted “Ḥāfiẓ” as his pen name in his poems. Most sources record his father’s name as Bahāʾ al-Dīn, and it is possible that Bahāʾ al-Dīn was, by convention, his title.

Biographers have written that his ancestors were from the foothills of Isfahan and that his forefather came from there to Shiraz during the rule of the Salghurid Atabegs and settled in this city. They have also written that his father, “Bahāʾ al-Dīn Muḥammad,” was a merchant, his mother was from the people of Kazerun, and their house was situated at the Kazerun Gate of Shiraz.

His birth took place in Shiraz in the first quarter of the eighth century AH. After the death of Bahāʾ al-Dīn, his sons scattered, but Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad, who was a small child, remained in Shiraz with his mother, and the two of them lived in poverty until a love for acquiring accomplishments drew him to the schoolroom. According to the details given in the Tadhkirat al-Maykhāna, he spent some time dividing his days between earning a livelihood and learning to read and write. Thereafter, Ḥāfiẓ’s life changed; he joined the ranks of seekers of knowledge, attended the teaching circles of the scholars and men of letters of the time in Shiraz, and engaged in the study and investigation of important religious and literary books such as al-Zamakhsharī’s Kashshāf, Qāḍī Bayḍāwī’s Maṭāliʿ al-Anwār, al-Sakkākī’s Miftāḥ al-ʿUlūm, and the like. Muḥammad Gulandām, his contemporary and the compiler of his Dīwān, saw him several times in the teaching circle of Qawām al-Dīn Abū al-Baqāʾ, ʿAbd Allāh ibn Maḥmūd ibn Ḥasan al-Iṣfahānī al-Shīrāzī (d. 772 AH), known as Ibn al-Faqīh Najm, the great scholar and jurist of his age, and heard his ghazals in that very gathering of learning and literature.

In that period, although Shiraz did not have a calm and stable political situation, it was considered a major center among the scholarly and literary centers of Iran and the Islamic world, and this blessing had been provided for the city of Saʿdī and Ḥāfiẓ through the prudence of the Salghurid Atabegs of Fars. In such an environment, where Shiraz was still a gathering place for great scholars, men of letters, mystics, and poets, he received his scholarly and literary training, and with his innate intelligence, natural talent, and astonishing perspicacity, he became the heir to a particular scientific and intellectual movement that had emerged in Fars before him and turned to aversion shortly after him.

Among the rulers of his time, Ḥāfiẓ praised several in his poetry or alluded to associating with and enjoying their company, such as Abū Isḥāq Īnjū (killed in 758 AH), Shāh Shujāʿ (d. 786 AH), and Shāh Manṣūr (d. 795 AH). At the same time, he was also connected with the Ilkhanid (Jalayirid) sultans who ruled in Baghdad, and among them he eulogized Sulṭān Aḥmad ibn Shaykh Uways (784–813 AH). Among the notables of Shiraz, he mentioned Ḥājī Qawām al-Dīn Ḥasan Tamghāchī (d. 754 AH) in his poems. In one instance, when the fame of Sulṭān Maḥmūd of the Deccan (780–799 AH) and his vizier Mīr Fayḍ Allāh Īnjū for patronizing poets reached Fars, Ḥāfiẓ became desirous of visiting the Deccan. Since the Bahmanī king of India and his vizier found him eager to travel to the Deccan, he went from Shiraz to Hormuz and boarded the Maḥmūdshāhī ship that had come from the Deccan. However, before the ship set sail, a contrary wind began to blow, and the poet left the ship—ostensibly to bid farewell to some friends on the shore of Hormuz, but in reality out of fear of the perils of a sea voyage—sent this ghazal to Mīr Fayḍ Allāh Īnjū, and returned to Shiraz:

To spend a moment with sorrow, the whole world is not worth; sell our cloak for wine, for better than this it is not worth.

Ḥāfiẓ’s death occurred in the year 792 AH. He had a wife and children. Several times in Ḥāfiẓ’s poems we come across allusions to the death of his child, among which is this couplet: Heart, did you see what that wise child beheld within the curve of this painted arch? In place of a silver tablet in his embrace, the firmament placed upon his head a silver tablet. Legends are current regarding his love for a girl named “Shākh-i Nabāt,” and according to those same tales, Ḥāfiẓ married that girl. Some have also considered Shākh-i Nabāt to be a spiritual and divine beloved; some have taken Shākh-i Nabāt as a metaphor for poetic talent; and yet another group has understood it as a metaphor for the reed pen. Ḥāfiẓ was a man of letters, learned in literary and religious sciences, and acquainted with the subtleties of philosophy and the truths of mysticism.

His extraordinary innate talent afforded him the capacity for prolonged reflection, accompanied by exquisitely delicate poetic imaginings, and he blended all these divine gifts with his refined taste and masterful, pleasing speech, thereby creating his unique masterpieces in the form of sublime ghazals.

He engaged with and responded to the finest ghazals of Rumi, Kamal, Sa'di, Homam, Ohadi, and Khwaju, or their best couplets. His utterance is in every instance select and choice, adorned with various pleasing embellishments, imbued with taste, and comprised of words each chosen with precise calculation and placed in its proper position.

Hafez's indebtedness to the style of Khwaju, especially to the ghazals of "Badaye' al-Jamal"—that is, the second part of Khwaju's Divan—is very strong, and in many instances, he has borrowed words, hemistichs, and couplets from Khwaju, incorporating them into his own ghazals with slight alteration, and this is apart from the numerous direct responses Hafez composed to Khwaju.

Among the poets to whom Hafez responded or by whom he was influenced, after Khwaju, Salman must be named.

The reason for this strong influence is that Salman Savaji, like Khwaju, was a contemporary of Hafez and among the luminaries whose poetry the Shirazi poet took as a model for his own work. Hafez's responses to and engagements with Sa'di, Rumi, and other master poets before him are not few, but his Divan is so replete with lofty couplets, sublime ghazals, and novel themes that these imitations and influences appear few and negligible among them.

Moreover, the sublimity of his standing in lofty philosophical and mystical reflections, and the power he possessed in expressing them in the most eloquent and melodious phrases, placed him, despite all these influences, above many poets of the past and rendered his Divan beloved by elite and common alike.

It must not be forgotten that Hafez's era coincided with the final stage of the evolution of the Persian language and literature and the Islamic culture of Iran; hence, his language and thought, when compared with the masters before him, are closer to us and more familiar to our hearts, and for this reason, we understand Hafez more than the poets of Khorasan and Iraq and appreciate his speech more.

Among the distinctive features of his utterance is that he expressed his subtle mystical and philosophical meanings, the fruits of his delicate imaginings and precise reflections, in the most concise, clearest, and most correct language. In every couplet, and sometimes in every hemistich, he has a subtle point which we term "mazmun" (theme/conceit). This mode of eloquence, which was of course not new in Persian poetry, was perfected by Hafez and brought to its most agreeable and pleasing form, and after him, poets, in emulating his manner of creating subtle "points" and devising delicate "themes" and encapsulating them in the most concise expressions—sometimes not exceeding a single couplet or even a single hemistich—went to extremes, and it is this very style that gradually led to the prevalence of the style known as "Indian." Another point in describing the distinctive features of Hafez's poetry is his particular attention to the deployment of various formal and semantic figures of speech in his couplets, such that one can scarcely find a couplet in his poetry devoid of the embellishment of rhetorical devices; yet his mastery in the employment of words and his skill in the application of these devices is such that the "artifice" has no effect on the "ease" of his speech, to the extent that the reader, at first glance, does not notice the crafted nature of Hafez's utterance.

(With all this, the most sublime and magnificent theme of Hafez's poetry must be recognized in his struggle against hypocrisy and dissimulation and his application of the concept of rendi [libertine spirituality], which grants his poetry and thought a special stature.)

Hafez is among the poets who achieved fame during his own lifetime and swiftly gained acceptance among connoisseurs in the most distant cities of Iran and even among Persian speakers of other lands, and he himself was aware of this fact.

Khwaja's universal and humanistic thought has granted him a global renown, to the extent that many great thinkers and poets of the world, under his influence, have created enduring works; among them, one can point to two great thinkers of East and West, namely Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German) and Rabindranath Tagore (Indian).

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List of Soroush Dabbagh's Lectures on Hafez:

Sin from the Perspective of Hafez and Nietzsche Mehr 94 Download Audio

Hafez and Malamatiyya Dey 95 Download Audio

Hafez and Forough Mordad 95 Download Audio

Hafez and Death Esfand 94 Sold through his website

Hafez and Perplexity Azar 97 Download Audio

The God of Hafez Azar 94 Sold through his website

Hafez and Saadi Tir 94 Sold through his website

Hafez and Satire Khordad 94 Sold through his website

In the Air of Hafez and Sepehri Ordibehesht 94 Sold through his website

Hafez and Rumi Ordibehesht 94 Sold through his website

Hafez and Khayyam Farvardin 94 Sold through his website

Hafez and Sin Esfand 93 Sold through his website

Hafez and the Quran Dey 93 Sold through his website

Wisdom and Hafez Aban 93 Download Audio

In the Presence of Hafez Mehr 93 Download Audio

Hafez and Profligacy Shahrivar 93 Download Audio

The Mind and Consciousness of Hafez Mordad 93 Download Audio

The Life of Hafez Khordad 93 Download Audio

Although Sin Was Not Our Choice, Hafez 1 Aban 94 Sold through his website

Although Sin Was Not Our Choice, Hafez 2 Aban 94 Sold through his website

Do Not Cast Your Tresses to the Wind, Lest You Cast Me to the Wind Khordad 93 Download Audio

It Was in My Heart Never to Be Without the Friend Mordad 94 Download Audio

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