Despite his towering presence in premodern Persian letters, Shams
al-Din Muhammad Hafiz of Shiraz (d. 1390) remains an elusive and
opaque character for many. In order to look behind the hyperbole
that surrounds Hafiz's poetry and penetrate the
quasi-hagiographical film that obscures the poet himself, this book
attempts a contextualisation of Hafiz that is at once
socio-political, historical, and literary. Here, Hafiz's ghazals
(short, monorhyme, broadly amorous lyric poems) are read
comparatively against similar texts composed by his less-studied
rivals in the hyper competitive, imitative, and profoundly
intertextual environment of fourteenth-century Shiraz. By bringing
Hafiz's lyric poetry into productive, detailed dialogue with that
of the counterhegemonic satirist, 'Ubayd Zakani (d. 1371), and the
marginalised Jahan-Malik Khatun (d. after 1391; the most prolific
female poet of premodern Iran), our received understanding of this
most iconic of stages in the development of the Persian ghazal is
disrupted, and new avenues for literary exploration open up.
Looking beyond the particular milieu of Shiraz, this study
re-assesses Hafiz's place in the Persian poetic canon through
reading his poems alongside those produced by professional poets in
other major centres of Persian literary activity who enjoyed
comparable fame in the fourteenth century. Recognising the
aesthetic achievements of his contemporaries does not diminish the
splendour of Hafiz's, rather it forces us to accept that Hafiz was
but one member of a band of poets who jostled for the limelight in
competing, often intersecting, patronage and reception networks
that facilitated intense cultural exchange between the cities of
post-Mongol Iran and Iraq. Hafiz's ghazals, characterised as they
are by conscious and deliberate hybridity, ambiguity, and polysemy,
are products of a creative mind bent on experimenting with genre.
While in no way seeking to deny the mystical stratum of the Persian
ghazal in its fourteenth-century manifestation, this study
emphasises the courtly and profane dimensions of the form, and
regards Hafiz through a sober lens with keen attention to his
dynamic role at the heart of a vibrant poetic community that was at
once both fiercely local and boldly cosmopolitan.
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