Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz

by Dick Davis

  Then there is the problem of wine in his verse. Hafez has a number of poems complaining about the closing of the wine-shops by Mobarez al-din, and other poems celebrating their reopening by Mobarez al-din’s son, Shah Shoja. It’s hard to see how the wine in these poems could be anything other than real. This is not to say that the wine in his poems can never have Sufi implications, since Hafez often appears to be playing with this possibility (playing with possibilities is a mode in which Hafez seems to be particularly at home), but my own feeling is that the wine in his poems is usually just that, literal wine. There is also the tone of Hafez’s lyrics to consider, especially when we compare them with lyrics by self-proclaimed Sufis or Sufi sympathizers such as Eraqi, Attar, or Rumi. The tone in these poets’ lyrical works tends to be consistent, focused, often relentless in its concentration; this is true of very few of Hafez’s poems, which tend to shift abruptly in tone and register, and can draw on quite different areas of knowledge or experience within just a few lines. Hafez’s poems often seem to seek to undermine any sense that there is one truth to be pursued at the cost of all others (which is of course the central tenet of Sufi poetry); his verse frequently slips or swerves from possibility to possibility in a way that is quite untypical of most unequivocally Sufi verse in Persian.

  The assumption that Hafez’s poems must be about more serious things than drinking wine and flirting with pretty wine-servers may derive, to some extent, from the accepted explanation of his pen-name, Hafez (his given name was Shams al-din Mohammad; like most Persian poets, he wrote under a pseudonym). It’s pointed out that “Hafez” means “One who knows the Qur’an by heart,” and by extension “One who recites the Qur’an.” The word comes from an Arabic root that means “to preserve” or “to keep,” and a hafez is someone who preserves the Qur’an in his heart. To give so much attention to flirting and wine-drinking seems more than a little inappropriate for someone who is publicly announcing that he knows the Qur’an by heart. But hafez also had another meaning in medieval Persian, according to which what was preserved in the heart was not the Qur’an but a knowledge of musical technique (which was passed on entirely by example and apprenticeship, not by texts, so music needed such “preservers” if it was to survive from one generation to the next). In medieval Iran “Hafez” was a fairly common soubriquet for a professional musician, especially a singer (the Iranian writer Homa Nateq lists a number of medieval musicians who incorporated the word hafez into their performing name, as a kind of advertisement of their musical mastery6). Musicians in medieval Persian society suggested almost exactly the opposite of what would be suggested by a reciter of the Qur’an, which was necessarily a respectable profession that presupposed a sober disposition. Musicians, on the other hand, were considered to be a fairly disreputable bunch, associated with dissipated and sometimes riotous behavior, a lifestyle that to the religiously respectable would be considered immoral.

  On the other hand, some of Hafez’s poems are undoubtedly about serious concerns that might be designated religious. More than once he says he is a bird from paradise trapped in the world, and that he wishes to return to a paradisal state. His mind is nagged by the unknowableness of life’s purposes, and he sometimes wonders whether it has a purpose at all. His verse is full of imagery and individuals drawn from religious tradition, and he talks about God’s forgiveness (of which he usually says he feels assured, despite the condemnation by others of the dissipated way in which he lives). His religious feelings are strong but unspecific, and he insists that they cross the boundaries of particular faiths; he says that Moslems, Christians, and Jews have an equal purchase on truth, but that love and compassion are the best guides to conduct, since dogmatic knowledge is unattainable. He doesn’t know, and he says no one else can know either, but he quests and searches.

  So does this mean that the religious, Qur’anic, meaning of hafez is, after all, the right one in his case? Possibly. But when we consider the jarring dichotomies within his poems, it seems most useful to recognize both meanings as being invoked by his pen-name: the lofty and religious on the one hand, and the dissipated and secular on the other. It’s even plausible that the presence of these two meanings, with their contradictory connotations, was precisely the reason that he chose “Hafez” as his pen-name. The name is a constant pun, one that evokes both the serious and the scandalous, the exaltedly religious and the sexily secular, that moves between both worlds, as Hafez’s poems do. To a medieval audience, the name would also have invoked the idea of music; it’s clear from his poems that Hafez loved music, and in his commentary Sudi remarks that Hafez was famous for the sweetness of his singing voice. It’s virtually certain that his poems were meant to be sung as much as to be recited, and that their association with musical performance (which still continues) was a strong one from the time that they were written.

  While it’s difficult to characterize Hafez in terms of western parallels, relating him to figures from European literature might be helpful to Anglophone readers. He can seem at times like Horace, in his simultaneous and paradoxical dependence on munificent patronage while advocating the joys of privacy and friendship away from centers of power; a love of wine and a ruefully acknowledged susceptibility to the pleasures and pains of Eros also unite them. He can seem like the medieval troubadours of southern Europe in his linking of poetry and music, and in the way that his verse is undoubtedly courtly and written for members of courts, but also has clear suggestions of a vagabond disreputableness about it. He can sound especially like those troubadours who practiced trobar clus (“closed form”), a style of verse deliberately packed with difficulties and allusions likely to be lost on outsiders – a technique which was, as Hafez says in one of his rubaiyat,7 meant for “art’s initiates,” excluding those not in the know. He can seem like Shakespeare in his abrupt switches of tone and scope of reference, the way wholly disparate areas of human experience are drawn into the same poetic moment. If we jump forward in time to a poet of a very different kind, Hafez’s poems can remind us of the songs of Bob Dylan, particularly his more meditative ones. Again, there is the music, and also the way a Dylan song often hovers at the edge of the paraphrasable, which might be because we don’t have enough background information to attempt the paraphrase, or because there isn’t a paraphrase, a back-story, to be found at all, simply a series of images that create a pervasive mood and suggest a thematic coherence. There is too the loathing of hypocrisy that comes through in some of Dylan’s songs, the earnest sense, casually conveyed, that life is too serious for posturing and lies. “So let us not speak falsely now, the hour is getting late” could easily be a line from Hafez.

  JAHAN MALEK KHATUN

  Hafez is among the two or three most famous Persian poets who have ever lived. Until quite recently, virtually no one had heard of Jahan Khatun. She had been known, locally at least, as a poet in her own lifetime, and after her death a few historians and retailers of literary anecdotes mentioned her, usually in passing, but to all intents and purposes she disappeared from view until her complete poems, in a bulky volume of over 550 pages, received their first publication in 1995. To have this extraordinary poet’s fascinating and often very beautiful poems emerge from six hundred years of virtual oblivion seems almost miraculous.

  Jahan Khatun’s parents married in 1324, and it seems that Jahan was their only child. She herself married at some time between 1343 and 1347; assuming that 1325 is the earliest she could have been born, she would have been in her early twenties, or (more probably) her teens at the time of her marriage. Her father, Masud Shah, king of Shiraz and Fars from 1336 to 1339, was murdered in 1342, soon after he had tried to take back the throne. Jahan Khatun cannot have been more than seventeen at the time of her father’s death, and she was probably a few years younger than this. Her uncle, Abu Es’haq, who became king in 1343, looked after her, and she became a cherished member of his court. As we have seen, Abu Es’haq was famous for his love of poetry and his patronage of poets (including
Hafez and Obayd-e Zakani) and it is very likely that he encouraged Jahan to write, despite the fact that it was at this time relatively unusual, though not unprecedented, for women to write poetry (or at least to write poetry that was circulated beyond an immediate circle of friends). One reason for this is that such an activity was thought to be immodest, and women tended not to be taught to read and write.8 Jahan was a notable exception: literate from a young age, she was also clearly quite capable of deciding for herself how much modesty she needed to display. It also seems more than plausible that, given Jahan’s dependence on her uncle and what we can imagine would be her feelings of gratitude toward him, she took up poetry partly as a way of pleasing him, as there were few surer ways of giving Abu Es’haq pleasure than writing him a good poem.

  The man she married was her uncle’s nadim – his bosom-buddy, drinking companion, and confidant – Amin al-din Jahromi. Whether this was in any way a love match we have no way of knowing. Certainly, whether or not mutual affection was involved, it will have been largely an arranged marriage. If Abu Es’haq had said, “You two should marry one another,” it would have been virtually unthinkable for either of them to say in response, “I’d rather not.”

  The great majority of Jahan Khatun’s poems are love poems, and they are usually about unhappiness in love. This is standard for lyric poets of her time, and nothing can be read into it. Indeed, taking a medieval poet’s poems as evidence of his or her life is an extremely risky thing to do. But one or two hints are perhaps significant. For

  example, as Abu Es’haq’s drinking companion, Amin al-din Jahromi was expected to stay up all night drinking with the king when this was what the king wished. More than once Jahan Khatun says that she doesn’t like a lover who is drunk; this is distinctive – it’s not a common trope in the poetry of the time. More than once, too, she says she lies awake all night waiting for her lover, who is off drinking somewhere, to come to her; or she mentions the fact that, when they share a bed, he’s in a drunken stupor, and she doesn’t like this either. In one poem she seems to refer to the marriage vows as the only time she has ever heard her lover say “yes” to her (see p. 175). But then a number of her poems also refer to happiness in love, occasionally in the present, more often as something from the past that is now remembered with affectionate nostalgia.

  Did she have other lovers besides her husband? Some of her poems seem to imply this, or at least to suggest that she has been in love with more than one person. To have taken a lover would have been very risky, if perhaps a bit less perilous for a favored princess than for most other women. There is some evidence that she married twice – two different possible husbands are referred to in biographical notices about her – though whether this was as the result of a divorce or her first husband’s death is unclear. The biographical notices also say she was extremely beautiful. The few female poets of medieval Iran are virtually always described in this way, but then they would be, wouldn’t they? Perhaps, though, she was indeed very beautiful; she certainly attracted notice, admiration, and envy. Some of her poems seem to indicate that she herself thought she was beautiful; this again is not a standard trope in the poetry of the period (boasting in medieval Persian poems is common enough, but it’s usually about one’s poetic abilities, rather than one’s physical charms), and so perhaps it indicates something she genuinely believed about herself, or at least something a lot of people had told her. At some point in her life Jahan Khatun had a daughter who died while still an infant or very young child; the grief apparent in the poems that she wrote in her daughter’s memory (there are twenty-three of them in all, varying from the longest, consisting of thirty-one double lines – what in English would be considered as sixty-two lines – to a number of four-line poems) is very affecting, and is obviously genuine.

  The palmy days of being a pampered princess at the center of a poetry-loving court did not last long, however. In 1353 Mobarez al-din marched an army out from Kerman, where he had his base, defeated Jahan Khatun’s uncle on the battlefield, and took over the government of Shiraz. In 1357 her uncle was brought back from Isfahan, where he had taken refuge, and executed. What happened to Jahan Khatun in the immediate aftermath is unclear, but for a while her life must have been in real danger. One poem, significantly enough written in the “fragment” (qate’) form, which was often used for personal anecdote and reminiscence, describes her as being held prisoner in a school while her captors argue as to what should be done with her (see p. 182). Another poem mentions the fact that, while she was imprisoned, no one at court dared mention her name (see p. 189). Still other poems, some of them again in the personal qate’ form, imply that she was forced into exile. Capture, imprisonment, and then exile seem to have been her fate; such a sequence of events seems more than plausible, but again we have to remember how unreliable medieval poetry can be as a source for autobiography, and no other sources mention what happened to her at this period in her life. It’s possible too that her husband, as one of Abu Es’haq’s closest associates, had shared the same fate as his prince, which would have meant that Jahan Khatun was now a widow. Certainly in the poems about exile it sounds as though she is really alone, with no one in whom she can confide. Perhaps it was at this point that she turned to religion; in a number of her poems she indicates that, as the world has treated her so wretchedly, she will now put her faith in God alone, not in her fellow men and women. The trope is conventional enough, but it fits her probable circumstances, and these poems can have the ring of bitterness and belief, of a personal disillusionment with the world.

  Events took a turn for the better for Jahan Khatun five years after Mobarez al-din had become the ruler of Shiraz, when his son Shah Shoja deposed him. Shah Shoja seems to have gone out of his way not only to reverse his father’s austerely ascetic public policies, but also to make friendly overtures to the poets whom his father had alienated. Like Abu Es’haq, he made his court a center of poetic activity, though one gets the impression that he was more of a fairly generous, hale-fellow-well-met kind of a ruler than the connoisseur and crony of poets that Abu Es’haq had been. On the plus side, he was politically astute where Abu Es’haq had been self-indulgent to the point of incompetence, and for most of the time his reign was a much more secure affair than Abu Es’haq’s had ever been. If Jahan Khatun was living in exile when Shah Shoja replaced his father as king, she returned to Shiraz soon after this, and seems to have remained there until her death. Whether she actually became a member of Shah Shoja’s court or not is not known, but she wrote poems in his praise, and seems to have been allowed to live out her days unmolested and in reasonable dignity. Her last poem dateable by internal evidence (a reference to Shah Shoja’s briefly reigning nephew) seems to have been written around 1393, by which time she will have been in her mid or late sixties; when she died is unknown.

  Jahan Khatun’s Divan (“Complete Poems”) is quite substantial, as it contains 1,413 ghazals (three times as many as Hafez’s Divan), the above-mentioned elegies for her daughter, over 300 rubaiyat, four praise poems (some of her ghazals are also, in effect, praise poems), and various fragments. It also contains a prose preface, written by herself, about her poems. While this is unique among the surviving works of Persian woman poets from the medieval period, it is frustratingly short on specific information both about her life and the circumstances in which her poems were written. Presumably she personally prepared the manuscript for copying, nevertheless the copies seem to be in a somewhat tentative state. For example, in a number of cases ghazals listed as separate poems look like drafts of the same poem, as they contain some of the same lines and rhymes juggled about in a different order. Four copies of the manuscript are known to have survived, two complete (and thought to have been copied either in her own lifetime or very shortly after her death), and two fragmentary – we can compare this with the, for example, over one thousand known manuscripts of Hafez’s poems.

  Even if their quality were fairly negligible (which is far from b
eing the case), Jahan Khatun’s poems would be of interest simply because hers is the only complete collection by a woman writing in Persian, at a time when it was considered anomalous for women to write poetry, to have come down to us from before the nineteenth century. Her preface may not give much away about her life, but it does touch on her ambitions as a poet. She had wanted to write poetry for some time (and she is eloquent as to why – as a stay against oblivion, as a comfort in her solitude), and had begun to do so, but she was held back by two things. Firstly she felt that this was perhaps not a suitable occupation for a woman, and secondly she was not sure she had sufficient talent to consider herself a “real” poet. She asks her readers to excuse her faults; as she modestly puts it:

  Not every eye can gaze at the sun

  Not every drop can reach the sea

  However, she was encouraged by the fact that various other women had written poetry before her in both Arabic and Persian (she lists a number of such poets by name), so she thought it would be allowable for her to do this too.

  Most of Jahan Khatun’s poems are ghazals, and, as we have seen, the rhetoric of the ghazal had been elaborated for a particular kind of poem, one supposedly written by an adult male to a younger lover who is in most cases considered to be a male adolescent. There is a paradoxical fiction at the heart of the ghazal: the rhetoric of the poem is that the speaker is inferior to the addressee, but in so far as these poems reflected any sort of social reality, the speaker was virtually always superior to the addressee – an older person, usually more powerful and wealthy, while the addressee was often a servant or a slave. When a woman uses such rhetoric some peculiar tensions are immediately set up: is she writing as a woman or is she writing as a man, and, if the latter, is this done with or without irony? And who is she writing to? Is this still basically a homoerotic poem, or can it now be assumed to be heterosexual, with the addressee to be considered as male? And is the addressee still a younger person, a pretty adolescent? Or, now that a woman is writing, should we consider the addressee to be a man of the same age, or perhaps older? The ironies are compounded by the fact that it is not only a woman writing but a princess. How seriously can we take a princess when she presents herself as inferior to the addressee of her poem?