Whoever still remembers from the last half of the previous century how amongst the Protestants of Germany not only clerics but also laymen could be found who had familiarised themselves with the Holy Scriptures so well that like living concordances, they were trained to provide a reference and context for all biblical verses and who, moreover, knew the principal passages by heart and kept them constantly on hand for any sort of application – whoever recalls this will also acknowledge that such men inevitably acquired considerable culture since their memories, occupied unceasingly with worthy objects, retained in their sensibility and judgment pure matter for both pleasure and use. They were termed ‘well-versed’ [bibelfest] and the designation conferred exceptional worth and unequivocal approbation.
What arose among us Christians out of natural disposition and good will was an obligation for Muslims; for while it redounded to the greatest credit of such a fellow believer to produce multiple copies of the Qur’an, or to have copies produced, it was no less meritorious to learn the scripture by heart, so as to be able to adduce apt passages on every occasion, to promote moral uplift and to smooth over conflicts. Such people were given the honorary title of Hafiz and this has remained the chief name which distinguishes our poet.
Now, to be sure, virtually from its very beginnings, the Qur’an as an object of the most unending interpretations provided an opportunity for exceedingly picayune subtleties; just because it aroused in everybody a need to make sense of it, vastly diverging opinions and demented conjectures – indeed, the most irrational connections of every sort – were sought, with the result that the genuinely intelligent and reasonable man had to bestir himself with great zeal simply to get back to the solid ground of the uncontaminated original text. This then is why, in the history of Islam too, we come across interpretations, applications and usages which are often astounding.
The finest poetic talent was trained and formed to just such agility; he knew the Qur’an entire and the religious edifice founded upon it was no mystery to him. He himself says:
Through the Qur’an have I done
Everything which has come to me.
As a dervish, Sufi and sheikh he taught in Shiraz, his birth-place, to which he confined himself, well liked and cherished by the Muzaffar family and its connections. He occupied himself with theological and grammatical projects, gathering a large number of students about him.
His poems stand in utter contradiction to such solemn studies and an actual teaching position, but this can be resolved by noting that a poet is not obliged to think and to live what he expresses, least of all when he falls in a later period into ticklish circumstances; when he comes close to rhetorical dissimulation and presents what his contemporaries prefer to hear. This seems to us to have been consistently the case with Hafiz. For just as a teller of fairy tales doesn’t believe in the enchantments which he represents but works only to animate them as best he can and stage them so that his auditors are swept away, even less does the lyric poet have to practise everything with which he diverts and cajoles readers and singers both high and low. Moreover, our poet seems not to have set great store by the songs which flowed so easily from him, for only after his death were they collected by his students.
We shall speak little of these poems for one should enjoy them and so arrive at some sense of unison with them. A measured, ever upwelling liveliness streams from them. Clever and gay in narrow circumstances and yet sharing in the fullness of the world, gazing from afar into the mysteries of the godhead but also refusing both religious practice and sensual pleasure – the one as well as the other – how utterly this kind of poetic art, whatever it may appear to promote and to teach, must maintain a nimble scepticism from beginning to end.