ABSTRACT
The poetry of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) is commonly grafted to classical Persian topoi, imagery, metaphors. Several war poets use classical poetry to communicate with their audiences as this poetry is familiar and they can effortlessly convey their political and ideological message. This article investigates how modern amateur poets use classical poetry to create their own poems for political and religious use. I shall specifically analyse a few instances in which the poetry of the classical Persian poet Hafez of Shiraz (1315–1390) is integrated in various ideologically Shiite contexts. Some scholars have argued that Hafez’s ghazals have little cohesion, characterizing the poem’s couplets as ‘pearls at random strung’, but as we shall see these ghazals enjoy thematic coherence, even their ambiguity creates spaces for a modern appropriation and interpolation of couplets in his poetry, allowing the use of a poem as a commentary on religious and political events. While I shall give attention to Hafez’s art of poetry, my main focus will be upon the modern application of his poetry by professional Shiite singers (maddāḥs) who perform such poems to whet the emotions of their audiences, placing the poem in a purely Shiite or ideologically Islamist propaganda.
Introduction
It is not an exaggeration to state that the poetry of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) is grafted to classical Persian poetry.Footnote1 Many poets make use of classical poetic resources to communicate with their audiences as the classical imagery and metaphors are familiar and they can effortlessly convey their political and ideological message. Another use of classical Persian is tażmīn. This term means ‘inserting the verses of another in one’s own poem’, but it literally means ‘taking as a surety or guarantee’.Footnote2 The war poets apply this literary means to safeguard the success of their poems. One example that I would like to concentrate upon is Hafez’s first ghazal, which has been used in various forms. Individual verses from this ghazal are employed in a wide range of religious, revolutionary or Iran-Iraq War contexts. To my knowledge, the committed revolutionary poets and professional Shiite singers (maddāḥs) sometimes use only the first two couplets to whet the emotions of their audience, placing the poem in a purely Shiite or ideologically Islamist context, i.e. using such poems for the ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran. These professional singers cleverly juxtapose lines from Hafez’s poetry to achieve a propagandistic goal. They use the familiarity of the Persian-speaking audience with Hafez to communicate a political message. As we shall see, there are poets who use this ghazal differently for a purely religious purpose.
Before engaging with an analysis of how this poem is contextualized and appropriated into a Shiite mourning context, I give the translation of the entire poem:
1. O cup-bearer, pass the cup round and bring it;Footnote3
for at first love seemed easy but problems occurred.
2. By the scent of the musk, Zephyr will at last untangle the locks,
making the hearts bleed by her curly tress.
3. Colour your prayer-mat with wine if the Elder Magi tells you to,
for the traveller is not unaware of the ways and the rites of the stations.
4. What safety and pleasure I have in the beloved’s house
when constantly the bell shouts: ‘Bind up your burden’.
5. A dark night, the fear of the waves and such a horrible whirlpool,
how on earth can the lightly-burdened on the shore know our conditions?
6. Because of self-gratification all I do leads finally to a bad name,
how can the secret, which is the subject of the assemblies, remain hidden?
7. Hafez, if you long for a presence, be not absent from him [i.e. the beloved]
When you attain your desire, forsake the world and let it go.
Hafez is making a statement by the first Arabic hemistich which has been the subject of much debate, especially because this line is probably a quotation from the Umayyad ruler Yazīd ibn al-Muʿāwiyya (d. 683), the caliph responsible for the killing of the third Shiite Imam, Husayn.Footnote4 The attribution of this line goes back to the Bosnian Turkish commentator Sūdī (d. 1598), who gives a linguistic and literal commentary on individual terms in Hafez’s ghazals, consciously avoiding mystical dimensions detected by later readers. According to Sūdī, the first hemistich is from a qasida (ode) by Yazīd. Sūdī also indicates that several poets such as Ahlī of Shiraz (1454–1535) complained of Hafez for using this tażmīn.
This particular ghazal is perhaps one of the most imitated poems of Hafez’s Dīvān. Generations of Persian and Turkish poets have tried their hand at imitating it.Footnote5 In contemporary Iranian history we see several imitations by Rūḥallāh Khomeini (1902–1989) and by several dilettante and a few competent poets. Lines from this poem are utilized in other poetry mobilizing people to take actions during the Iran-Iraq War, either going to war, processing the traumas of the war, mourning the fallen, or celebrating the martyrdom of Imām Husayn, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad (d. 632), who was killed in Iraq in 680, on the tenth day of the month of Muharram, in an unequal battle against a mighty army. Crucially, he had called for help from the Shiites, but had fought almost alone. This is the most traumatic event in the history of Shiism and is re-enacted annually by Shiites around the world.
What is fascinating and unique for a literary scholar is to see how Hafez’s ghazal is adapted in a completely new context, generating new meanings for individual words and concepts, such as occurs in the poem by Muhammad Ḥasan Ḥusāmī (or Ḥisāmī) Maḥvalātī. The lover is still the unknown lover we read in the original poem by Hafez, who wants to drink wine to forget his lovesickness, but the lover is now changed to Imam Husayn. The poet is not alone as he invites the entire public to sing and shed tears collectively, while beating their chests. In this way, these Iranians are claiming that Hafez was/is a Shiite, his poem is not a secular love poem or a mystical one, but rather a religious poem, written to evoke grieving for and emotions aroused by Husayn’s martyrdom.Footnote6 Although the majority of literary educated Iranians know that the first line of the poem, ‘O cup-bearer, pass the cup round and bring it’, is probably by Yazīd, the person responsible for the killing of Husayn and his followers, the Iranian mourners do not bother that the line is by Yazīd at all, and they chant this line to mourn Husayn’s death. Lines from Hafez’s ghazals were used during the 1979-Revolution to comment on socio-political events. This trend continued during the Iran-Iraq War. The adaptations of classical Persian poetry in general, and Hafez’s poetry in particular, to events in the contemporary age is due to the fact that classical Persian poetry is a living tradition and people know many lines of this literary repertoire by heart.
In Ḥusāmī’s poem, the first hemistiches of each couplet are by the poet himself, while the second are by Hafez. The effect is that the rhyme scheme of the original poem is maintained. As a Persian ghazal has the rhyme scheme of aa, ba, ca, etc., Ḥusāmī has used Hafez’s entire first couplet and has placed the verses in his couplet one and two. Visually, the reader sees on the pages that the first columns are all new while the second columns are all from Hafez; only the order of the lines of 5 and 6 of the original are changed. The poem is as follows:
1. Under the blade of the murderers, the king of the thirsty ones was saying:Footnote7
‘O cup-bearer, pass the cup round and bring it’.
2. Apart from the king of the oppressed, you will not see any sincere lovers,
for at first love seemed easy but problems occurred.
3. When prince Akbar’s head was split by the sword of rancour
making the hearts bleed by his musky curls.
4. Say: ‘Be ready Zeynab because at ʿĀshūrā’s afternoon,
the bell cries, ‘Bind up your burden’’.
5. The head of our martyr king became hidden under the ashes,
how can the secret, which is the subject of the assemblies, remain hidden?
6. The king’s children, immersed in fear, said at nightfall in the desert:
how on earth can the lightly-burdened on the shore know our states?
Searching the first half-line of the ghazal on the internet gives 14,300 results, all related to the commemoration of Husayn or the fallen soldiers. In one case, Ḥusāmī’s first couplet functions as a tażmīn for another poem, showing how such poems experience their own reception history.Footnote8 Hafez’s ghazal is a love poem, but it is transformed into an elegy at Ḥusāmī’s hand, as we shall see shortly. I have analysed Hafez’s ghazal at length in another publication.Footnote9 Here I give very briefly the content of the original ghazal and how the poem is changed into a requiem for a Shiite saint.
In Hafez’s poem there is a lover who calls on a cupbearer in the imperative to bring another round of wine. The motivation for drinking is offered in the second hemistich, i.e. love. Here the lover realizes that there are two types of love, one an easy love which the lover started to practise, but it just ‘seemed’ (nimūd, also lit. ‘revealed’) to be easy, for problems are piling up.Footnote10 The poet creates an antithesis (tażādd) between easy and difficult love. It is also possible to distinguish between metaphorical or illusionary (majāzī), and real (ḥaqīqī) and transcendental love. The lover seeks refuge in wine, begging the cupbearer to pour him more wine to ease his pain. The contrast between the two sorts of love is the leitmotiv of the poem, as Hafez uses the figure of ‘antithesis’ throughout the poem, creating contrasts and cohesion.
While Hafez’s ghazal is polyphonic and poly-thematic, oscillating between transcendental and profane interpretations, the imitation is extremely one-dimensional. Here the poet tells the story of Imam Husayn’s death by using a familiar metre, rhythm and rhyme, and especially Hafez’s lines that many people know by heart. The first compound words immediately introduce Husayn through his epithet ‘the king of thirsty lips’ (shah-i lab-tishnigān) and then the tragic action: being killed under the sword of the enemy. The paradox of the first line is that Husayn’s last words, asking the cupbearer to pour more wine into the beakers, are by Yazīd. The use of Arabic as the language of the Quran is significant for the Persian audience. In his radīf rhyme, Hafez uses the Arabic -hā combined with the Persian plural marker -hā. Using Arabic and Persian verses in one poem is called mulammaʿ, ‘patch-work’, or ‘macaronic’.Footnote11 The question is whether the average modern Persian audience knows the exact meaning of the Arabic verse or whether they are imagining that Husayn is saying a prayer. Any discussion on this would be speculation but it is interesting to see that when the singer arrives at this specific Arabic line, the audience cries.
In the first couplet Ḥusāmī associates wine with blood. The convivial gathering that Hafez depicts in his poem is entirely changed to a mourning session. In Hafez’s poem a separated lover visits such a festive gathering, imploring the cupbearer to bring him more wine to cure problems caused by love. Wine as a medicine is no longer the interpretation. In this new reading, wine is unequivocally blood and the cupbearer is God, who bestows martyrdom on Husayn. The first half-line is so specific that any other interpretation would go against a devout and pious Shiite reading.Footnote12 In other words, Ḥusāmī places Hafez’s ghazal in a strict narrow format, eliminating any other interpretations.
In the second couplet, using Hafez’s line about the hardships in the path of love, Ḥusāmī connects the theme of love to Husayn as a faithful lover. Here Husayn is depicted as the ‘king of the oppressed’ (shāh-i maẓlūmān). The term ‘oppressed’ is significant as it refers to the Shiite community, which felt itself to have been oppressed through history by rulers who usurped the position of the Shiite imams, the rightful descendants of the prophet Muhammad.
The next step the poet takes in the third couplet is to refer to Husayn’s eldest son, Akbar, who was also killed at Karbala. Ḥusāmī lucidly describes how Akbar’s head is split in two and then connects this to Hafez’s line ‘from his curly locks, such blood welled up in lover’s hearts’. The connecting bonds between Hafez’s couplet and Ḥusāmī’s interpretation are the curls and blood. Ḥusāmī uses the listeners’ familiarity with the story, appropriating Hafez’s words to amplify the audience’s emotions. In the original poem, Hafez employs motifs from the genre of nature poetry (rabīʿiyyāt), introducing the beloved’s sweet musky smell and how the Zephyr (ṣabā) carries the smell to the lover, making him desirous to long for the beloved. But here love and longing are transformed into death and blood. The black musk and the red blood, colours occurring in the original poem, are reduced to the blood.Footnote13 Also the beloved’s nice smell has disappeared. Instead of the lover who craves for the beloved, here the audience’s hearts are bleeding for the tragic and violent death of the young Akbar.
It is fascinating how individual lines are connected to the Karbala event. The second hemistich of the fourth couplet, ‘the bell cries, “Load up, to depart!”’, has inspired Ḥusāmī to divert the story to the events related to Husayn’s sister, Zeynab, who, after the death of almost all the males, journeys with the rest of the women and children to another town. This line also functions as a transition to a conclusion. In the original poem Hafez refers to the ephemeral nature of this world and why man should leave this world behind. But here Ḥusāmī speaks in direct speech to Zeynab, informing her that she has to depart from Karbala in the afternoon of the ʿĀshūrā. Hafez’s original text refers to life as a caravan and individuals are travellers who halt at each station, but finally they have to depart. This reading is changed into the depiction of Zeynab’s journey. Here again, Ḥusāmī makes use of the audience’s emotions by connecting Hafez’s line to the time and setting at Karbala. As people know the story of Husayn as well as Hafez’s poem, they can easily imagine what is happening.
After referring to Husayn’s death, Akbar, Zeynab and the departure of the women, Ḥusāmī turns in the fifth couplet to the motif of secret. While in Hafez’s original poem the secret refers to love, here it stands for Husayn’s message, i.e. martyrdom. The word ‘ashes’ refers to the burning of the tents of Husayn’s family and Zeynab’s flight from the Karbala desert, while also arousing the audience’s emotions by depicting Husayn’s severed head under ashes. The hidden head beneath the ashes is connected to the secret, yet it metaphorically refers to the Shiite opinion that Husayn is the right ruler of the Muslim community and that his position is usurped by the Umayyad dynasty, especially by Yazīd. The secret explicitly refers to martyrdom, as Husayn, the ‘king of martyrs’, is a model for the Shiite community who fought for justice and offered his life. Hafez’s original line, ‘How can a secret remain hidden when people gather to talk about it?’, refers to the gatherings of people rebuking the behaviour of the ill-reputed lover, but here all attention is directed at the severed head covered in ashes to rouse the audience’s emotions.
The final couplet refers to the condition of Husayn’s children who are orphaned and are wandering in the desert, chanting Hafez’s verse, ‘how on earth can the lightly-burdened on the shore know our states?’. In the original poem by Hafez, the lover is journeying in the ocean facing horrible whirlpools and dashing waves in the middle of the night. He wonders whether people who are safely on the shore can understand his condition. The Persian reader can easily juxtapose the sea voyage with the desert journey of the orphans who, having lost their protections, are feeling unsafe.Footnote14 This terrifying condition appeals to the audience’s emotions, arousing their feelings of empathy for Husayn and his family.
What is interesting in this appropriation of Hafez into a purely modern Shiite context, commemorating Husayn’s death, is how modern poets connect two traditions in one single point. Ḥusāmī omits all the provocative antinomian motifs of Hafez’s poem except the bacchanalian motif in the first couplet, which for him serves to connect it to the shedding of blood, and, for a Persian audience, an interpretation based on martyrdom. Ḥusāmī omits antinomian motifs such as the advice of the Elder Magi, residing in a wine-house and advising the lover to colour his prayer-mat with wine. Such motifs are apparently too transgressive to be turned into a pious Shiite context. Furthermore, Hafez’s use of ascetic motifs, such as the renunciation of ego and abandoning the world, is either ignored or changed into a worldly metaphor.
One of the main reasons why Hafez’s poems can easily be appropriated is ambiguity, which has even led some scholars to argue that there is little cohesion in Hafez’s ghazals, referring to the couplets as ‘pearls at random strung’.Footnote15 Although these ghazals are emphatically coherent, as I have shown in other publications, their interpretation is not always straightforward.Footnote16 It is this lack of obviousness that creates an ambiguous space for other interpretations and even for removing each hemistich and weaving this into another poem to create a completely different poem for a new audience. In such a new creation, the polythematic quality, so characteristic of Hafez’s style, is removed. It could be argued that Hafez’s ambiguity and abstruseness have paradoxically led to the flattening of his multi-thematic and multi-interpretable poem to one concrete specific purpose.
The poem off the page
So far we have paid attention to the poem on the page, but this poem, like its original counterpart, is composed to be performed. There are several modern performances of Hafez’s ghazal available which invite the reader/listener to enjoy the composition aesthetically.Footnote17 The performance of Ḥusāmī’s imitation is quite different. The poem is performed by a professional religious singer called a maddāḥ. These singers usually choose songs from contemporary and classical poets to narrate the events of Karbala with the goal of making the audience lament. They usually choose poems that the audience already knows, or they make small changes to surprise the audience. The goal is to get the audience to shed tears collectively, renewing their sympathies with Husayn and his family by publicly weeping, and showing their devotion to the Shiite saint. In this particular case, the singer is Meytham Muṭīʿī.Footnote18 I have chosen this performance simply because it is the first hit of the Google search. Such mourning gatherings are usually organized during the commemoration of the Shiite saints or on the occasions of an political event, memorializing a martyr. It is worth knowing that Muṭīʿī is one of the religious singers at Ali Khamenei’s residence, the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.Footnote19 Muṭīʿī usually combines religious topics with the Islamist ideology of the Islamic Republic. This performance lasts for 7:37 minutes.
Muṭīʿī sings the first line twice in a kind of monotonous voice, while the audience cries loudly, accompanying the singer. The sound of weeping functions as a musical accompaniment to the song. The singer does not respond to the audience and continues to sing until the last phrase of the second couplet. When he arrives at the rhyme phrase ‘but problems piled up’, he repeats this phrase and bursts into tears himself, an invitation to the audience to cry even more loudly. At this moment, the entire audience calls ‘Husayn jān’, (Husayn dear!) in chorus four times. Then, the singer starts singing again with the line about the cutting off of Akbar’s head. On hearing the word ‘split’ (bishkāft) part of the audience loudly laments. He finishes the line and twice repeats ‘Husayn dear’. Afterwards, he says, ‘it is the last night, my good master! Is it possible to recommend us to your mother because during the last night, people give rewards, they give compensation for having functioned as a servant (nawkarī)’.Footnote20 At this moment, everyone cries loudly. The reference to Husayn’s mother, Fāṭima, the daughter of the prophet and the wife of the first Shiite Imam, is significant as it refers to the concept of shafāʿa(t) or ‘intercession’.Footnote21 This implies that the holy figures will intercede on Judgment Day so that believers will go to Paradise. The reference to Faṭima has a strategic significance as it allows the singer to talk to the female part of the audience. Therefore, the singer adds, ‘His mother chooses, from among male servants, from among women she selects your [Husayn’s] servants’. Then the singer continues while lamenting, ‘This is the lamentation of the Final Night (shām-i gharībān). Has no one a breath to cry any longer? Say to your mother [people cry loudly and the singer twice says “Husayn dear”, accompanied by the audience]’.Footnote22 At this moment he starts by singing the fourth couplet. When he arrives at the words ‘to bind up your burden’ he adds how Zeynab places everyone on camel litters. When the singer starts with the first two words of the fifth line, nahān shud or ‘remain hidden’, he adds ‘where did they take the head?’ (sar rā kujā burdand). He repeats the line and people burst in tears. Then, he adds, ‘what is happening at this moment in Karbala’, bringing people back to the tragic event in 680, making people lament. Afterwards, he sings the last line about the fearful children who are wandering in the desert at night. When the singer arrives at the phrase ‘the lightly-burdened on the shore’ he himself weeps loudly. In this way, the singer places himself and the audience, who less than a minute ago had to imagine that they were in the Karbala desert in 680 witnessing the events, they are now simply watching the events from a distance. The phrase ‘lightly-burdened’ also evokes the feeling that the Shiite people did not assist Husayn when they had the chance to do so. This refers to the historical guilt that the Shiites carry with them, and at these ceremonies they give vent to their feelings of guilt. People again say, ‘Husayn dear!’. The singer invites the audience to repeat ‘Husayn dear’ more emphatically in the same way they used to say this phrase on the very first night of the month Muharram, the first night of mourning. To encourage the audience to do so, the singer states, ‘perhaps you may not be alive this time next year’. The performance ends with the collective call of ‘Husayn dear!’.
Appropriation of Hafez
Appropriating Hafez’s ghazals for religious and political purposes is not new, as there are several cases in which his ghazals are deployed to justify a cause or to foreground a message. Alavi and Shams refer to the ways the eminent Persian poet and scholar, Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, appropriates Hafez’s mystical message to criticize Mohammad Reza Shah.Footnote23 Appropriation of Hafez by established modern Persian poets such as Nādir Nādirpūr (1929–2000) appears in a convoluted way, allowing the poets to create extra poetic space with various layers of meanings. But the dilettante modern poets, mostly supported by Islamic Republic, destabilize the poems, remove the multi-layered meanings of a poem, with the aim of producing a one-dimensional and clear message to be used as propaganda. This propaganda is designed to propagate the culture of martyrdom, implying that even a poet such as Hafez would support it. Hafez was not a Shiite, but such appropriation of his poetry suggests that he was certainly a Shiite Persian, or that he at least supported the idea of martyrdom.Footnote24
Hafez’s first ghazal was, for instance, not only adopted for the ʿĀshūrā commemoration during the Iran-Iraq War, but it was also used for Khomeini’s death in 1989. Several of the Islamic Republic’s maddāḥs, such as Gholam-Ali Kovaytipur and Husayn Fakhrī perform the following poem. Unlike the previous poem just discussed, the following piece, which can be found throughout the internet, consists of four couplets, the first two by a modern amateur poet and the last two by Hafez (indicated in bold).Footnote25 These are couplets one and four of Hafez’s original poem. The familiar metre and rhyme of Hafez’s poem adapted in the first two couplets connect the poem to Hafez’s poem, placing it in a desired context, either religious mourning, such as Khomeini’s passing, Husayn’s martyrdom, or the memorializing of a fallen soldier of the Iran-Iraq War:
How hard is it to cross the stations while separated from you
Thinking of your memory, I weep so hard that the litter will stick in the mud.
From the heart’s blood I will colour the caravan on love’s path
O thirsty rose, your branding has thrown fire in the hearts
O cup-bearer, pass the cup round and bring it
for at first love seemed easy but problems occurred.
What safety and pleasure I have in the beloved’s house
when constantly the bell shouts: ‘Bind up your burden’.
Such poems have a huge impact as people are deeply familiar with the rhyme and rhythm of Hafez’s poem. In fact, the second hemistich of Hafez’s first couplet has achieved proverbial status, used when people wish to indicate that a job is very difficult from how it at first appeared. This familiarity, together with the simple word choice of the lines by the dilettante poet, make such appropriation one of the most successful tools for rousing the audience’s emotions, but also for mobilizing people for a religious cause or simply for propaganda. Although such appropriation is an age-old practice, it can be cautiously stated that the popularization of such poems in a political and religious context is part of the literary production during the Iran-Iraq War. Most of such appropriated poems are available online, together with their performances by famous religious singers. These performances are closely related to the Islamic regime as the majority of these maddāḥs are financially supported by the state. These are the same people who used to sing young Iranian soldiers to their death, sending them to the front to offer their lives, to be killed like the Shiite martyr-saint Husayn during the war. The emphasis of such poems is on their performance rather than on the poet. The composers of such poems are dilettantes, and it is hard to discover their identities. What matters most is the performance of the maddāḥ on the occasion of a political event, often organized by the state. It is in this framework that such appropriation turns entirely into the regime’s propaganda of martyrdom, to justify killing and being killed, and to make death meaningful.
This modern appropriation of Hafez also shows the Shiite ideological resistance to mysticism and a multi-layered interpretation, removing any ambiguity. Such appropriation violates the nature of Hafez’s ghazals, which has been appreciated for seven hundred years, for its ambiguity. Such appropriations interrupt the regnant classical literary conventions of the ghazals, famous for their ambiguity and polyphonic themes, motifs, and metaphors. While such flattened appropriation takes advantage of people’s familiarity with Hafez to communicate a religio-political propagandistic message, it also paradoxically defamiliarizes the classical ghazal, even estranging the reader from Hafez. Having said this, it would be noted that classical Persian poetry is a living tradition and such innovations, however dull and mundane, are part of the process of keeping Hafez’s name and his ghazals popular among various hierarchies of the society, also among the lay maddāḥs.
Conclusion
Such examples of appropriating Hafez in a contemporary Shiite context show the role of poetry in today’s religious culture of Iran and how this poetry has remained a living tradition for centuries. The utilitarian aspect of such poetry is what matters in the case analysed above, rather than a classical poem’s aesthetic values and literary merits. The audience possibly believes that Hafez actually composed this love poem for Imam Husayn and that variations on his poem offer new dimensions of Husayn’s martyrdom. Probably the contemporary poets consider their appropriation as a pious work, a service to the community of the Shiites, to be rewarded in the Hereafter. Such appropriation by the Shiite community also helps to heal traumas Iranians have suffered in the last decades, especially during the Iran-Iraq war. These poets and their audiences probably surmise that the Arabic hemistich is simply an allusion to a holy text, the way the Arabic language is conceived in Iran. The association with Yazīd, the murderer of Husayn, is entirely absent. For those audiences who know that the line is by Yazīd, who used it in a secular bacchanalian setting, such contemporary religious and elegiac usages corroborate the schizophrenic quality of modern Iranian society. From a purely literary perspective, such modern appropriation damages the artistic and multi-layered quality of Hafez’s convoluted poem.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Kevin L. Schwartz, Goulia Ghardashkhani, Olmo Gölz and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and critical comments.
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The author reports there are not competing interests to declare.
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Notes
1 For recent studies examining the poetry of Iran-Iraq war literature see Fatemeh Shams, A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-option under the Islamic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Seyed-Gohrab, Martyrdom, Mysticism and Dissent: The Poetry of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021).
2 More on tażmīn see N. Chalisova, ‘Persian Rhetoric: Elm-e Badiʿ and Elm-e Bayān’, in General Introduction to Persian Literature, ed. J.T.P. de Bruijn, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 154; E.G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906, reprint, 1956) 2, 45; F. Steingass, Persian-English Dictionary, 5th print, (London: Routledge, 1963), s.v. tażmīn.
3 Hafez, Dīvān, ed. P. Nātil Khānlarī, (Tehran: Khvārazmī, 1362/1983), 18. For a poetic translation of this poem see Dick Davis, Hafez: Faces of Love and the Poets of Shiraz (Washington D.C. Mage Publishers, 2012), 10–11; also Peter Avery, The Collected Lyrics of Háfiz of Shíráz (Cambridge: Archetype, 2007), 18; on translatability of Hafez’s ghazal see Dick Davis, ‘On Not Translating Hafez’, New England Journal 25, (1990): 310–18; On the translation of the first ghazal see Michael C. Hillmann, ‘The Translatability of Hāfiẓian Love Ghazals’, International Journal of Persian Literature 3, (2018): 61–4.
4 See Khurramshāhī, Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, vol. 1, (Tehran: ʿilmī va farhangī, 1375/1996), 91. Khurramshāhī refers to Mīrzā Muḥammad Qazvīnī, ‘Baʿżī tażmīnhā-yi Ḥāfiẓ’, Yādgār 1, no. 9 (1324/1945): 65–78. Also see Murat Umut Inan, ‘Crossing Interpretive Boundaries in Sixteenth Century Istanbul: Aḥmed Sūdī on the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ of Shiraz’, in Philological Encounters 3, (2018), 275–309; K. Burrill, ‘Sūdī’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs, available online https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/sudi-SIM_7121?s.num=0&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.encyclopaedia-of-islam-2&s.q=Sudi (accessed February 20, 2024); M. Istiʿlāmī, Dars-i Ḥāfiẓ, (Tehran: Sukhan, 1382/2003), 67–9; Meisami deals with this ghazal, giving ample attention to Sūdī’s glosses, while linking her analysis to classical literary Arabic poetry, demonstrating how certain motifs and metaphors are taken from Arabic. See Julie Scott Meisami, ‘A Life in Poetry: Hāfiz’s First Ghazal’, in The Necklace of the Pleiades: 24 Essays on Persian Literature, Culture and Religion, ed. Franklin Lewis and Sunil Sharma (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2010), 163–81. On poetic virtuosity see J.T.P. de Bruijn, ‘Ḥāfiẓ, iii. Ḥāfiẓ’s Poetic Art’, Encyclopædia Iranica, https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/hafez-iii (accessed February 20, 2024).
5 See, for instance, Kemal Silay, Nedim and the Poetics of the Ottoman Court: Medieval Inheritance and the Need for Change (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Turkish Studies Department, 1994), 32–3; E.J.W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry 6 , (London: Luzac & Co, 1900–1907); The Persian Dīvān of Yavuz Sulṭān Selīm: A Critical Edition, ed. Benedek Péri, (Budapest: Research Centre for the Humanities, 2021).
6 Hafez is usually seen as a Shiite in modern Persian contexts and his poetry is contextualized within Shiite rites and rituals. See, for instance, ʿAlī-Riżā Dhakāvatī Qarāguzlū, ‘Tafsīr-i Shīʿī az yik ghazal-i Ḥāfiẓ’, Maʿārif 1, (1369/1990): 83–100.
7 This poem appears on many Iranian websites such as www.emam8.com (accessed March 24, 2023).
8 See www.zobdatolashaar.ir (accessed March 24, 2023).
9 See my upcoming book on Hafez entitled At the Tavern’s Dust.
10 The verb is pronounced differently as nimūdan, numūdan, or namūdan meaning ‘to show, demonstrate, cause to appear’. See Steingass, ‘numūdan’.
11 Chalisova, ‘Persian Rhetoric’, 146; Browne, A Literary History of Persia 2: 44–7.
12 For an interesting discussion of wine in Hafez and Ali Khamenei see Shams, A Revolution 313.
13 I owe the insight about black and red colours in this ghazal to my late mentor J.T.P. de Bruijn (personal communication).
14 The juxtaposition of desert and ocean appears in several medieval texts, an example is ʿAyyūqī’s Varqa and Gulshāh and its literary equivalent Floris and Blancheflour. See Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, ‘Of Love and Loyalty: The Middle English Floris and Blauncheflour and the Persian Warqa and Golshah’, in The Layered Heart: Essays on Persian Poetry, ed. Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab (Washington D.C.: Mage Publishers, 2019), 99–126.
15 See A.J. Arberry, ‘Oriental Pearls at Random Strung’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 11, (1943): 688–712; J.T.P. de Bruijn, ‘The Ghazal in Medieval Persian Poetry’, in A History of Persian Literature: Persian Lyric Poetry in the Classical Era 800–1500: Ghazals. Panegyrics and Quatrains, vol. 2, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 315–487. On ambiguity see Thomas Bauer, A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam, trans. by Hinrich Biesterfeldt and Tricia Tunstall (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021); also see N. Chalisova, ‘Ihām’, Encyclopædia Iranica, available online https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iham (accessed February 20, 2024).
16 See, for instance, Ali-Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, ‘Sufism in Classical Persian Poetry’, in Routledge Handbook on Sufism, ed. L. Ridgeon (London: Routledge, 2020), 187–200.
17 On the performative aspects of Hafez’s poems see chapter two of Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Hafez and his Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance and Patronage in Fourteenth-Century Iran (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 69–114.
18 See the website www.meysammotiee.ir (accessed March 25, 2023.
19 For such poetry performances see Shams, A Revolution in Rhyme, 286–331; Mahdi Tourage, ‘Desire, Power and Agency: Iranian Female Poets Reading Their Poems before the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic’, Iran Namag: A Bilingual Quarterly of Iranian Studies 6, no. 2 (2021), 37–59.
20 The singer is saying that a worker is paid on the final day. As Ḥusayn is killed on the tenth of Ashura, the singer is emphasizing that the mourners will be rewarded at the end of that day.
21 See A.J. Wensinck, D. Gimaret, and A. Schimmel, ‘Shafāʿa’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd Edition, ed. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs, available online https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/shafaa-COM_1019?s.num=0&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.encyclopaedia-of-islam-2&s.q=shafa%27a, (accessed February 20, 2024); David Pinault ‘Shia Lamentation Rituals and Reinterpretations of the Doctrine of Intercession: Two Cases from Modern India’, History of Religions 38, no. 3, (1999), 285–305.
22 The phrase shām-i gharībān means literally ‘the night of strangers’ referring to the tragic conditions of Husayn’s family who are wandering in the desert. There are specific ceremonies and rituals for this particular night. In Tehran, some people cover their dresses, faces and heads with mud while holding candles to show their sympathy with Husayn’s family.
23 See Shams, A Revolution in Rhyme, 191; Samad Josef Alavi, Poetics of Commitment in Persian: A Case of Three Revolutionary Poets in Iran, (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2013), 77–83. Such appropriations appear quite frequently in the works of established modern Persian poets to criticize political establishment. See Ali-Aghar Seyed-Gohrab, Martyrdom, Mysticism, and Dissent, 197–204.
24 In a few cases in medieval times, Hafez is described as a martyr. See Sunil Sharma, ‘The Sufi-Poet-Lover as Martyr: ʿAṭṭār and Ḥāfiẓ in Persian Poetic Tradition’, in Martyrdom in Literature: Visions of Death and Meaningful Suffering in Europe and the Middle East from Antiquity to Modernity, ed. D. Pannewick (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2004), 241–2.
25 Searching the first line of this poem offers 1540 hits on google: چه دشوار است پیمودن، به هجران تو، منزلها - Google Zoeken.