Foreword

A few years ago I wanted to write a treatise about the trilateral relationship of man, the world, and God: If the idea of God exists, what is the nature and characteristic of man’s connection to himself and to the world? And what if the idea does not exist? And today, how does the presence or absence of this idea build and advance our relationship with the world? What meaning does it give to our life? I did not intend to investigate religion or any other idea or concept; however, I had gone to the sources to cleanse and refresh my spirit. Nevertheless, I wanted to base my work only on the Gathas. In other words, I wanted to organize my thoughts according to the structure, the connections, and the continuity of the worldview of these hymns and shape my own thinking within this warp and weft in order for the idea to be born and become universal.

Once I began writing, however, my path was blocked. Subconsciously, Zoroaster’s hymns reminded me of the ghazals¹ of Hafez. In both, the same presence at the dawn of creation and at the end of time, the same eagerness to see the friend, the same self-reflection and seeing him with the heart’s eye, and choosing to reside in the house of light and song, or the alley of the friend, effervesce like water from a spring or light from dawn. And it is as if light is the face of existence.

In any case, each time, a ghazal greeted a stanza of a hymn and took over my mind, leaving no room for anything else. Early on, I thought it was a coincidence and paid no attention to it. But because this occurred repeatedly, I became hesitant. Eventually, after an entire month during which I made no progress, I closed the notebook, and, freeing my mind of other preoccupations, I went on a pilgrimage to the poet who had summoned me. Several months passed and I was bewildered. It was as though I had never read Hafez, or perhaps I had never been in the right mood for such a happy experience. And now, this book is the souvenir of that journey and that bewilderment.

Thus it was that involuntarily I stumbled upon a path that I did not choose. I did not want it, since I knew that speaking about Hafez was a daunting task. He is closer to us than any other poet, and at the same time, he is more remote than any other poet. We have all had some dealings with him in one way or another. Some of us have become familiar with him, and some have expressed devotion to him. He has been within us and has lived inside us as long as we have let him be as he is; but as soon as we have tried to delve into him through “scholarship,” logical analysis, and so on, he has slipped out of our grasp and disappeared before our myopic eyes. It is as though he is a living body, and as soon as we open it up to learn the secret of his life, we take his life. “Hafez studies” is a slippery slope. This writer has merely taken an excursion for a while in the garden of Hafez’s Divan and said a few words about what he has seen. This excursion and observation, however, has been undertaken with some preparation and on a particular path, not an accidental wandering.

In our history, the teaching of sciences has always been by degrees. Religious jurisprudence, medicine, mathematics, theology, philosophy, poetic techniques, and so on were external matters that had their own particular logic and function. The seeker of knowledge had to travel, step by step, to further and loftier stages. But since the truth was not divisible by degrees, the wayfarer would be provided with it in its entirety from the beginning. The child would begin with the Koran. The Koran was the divine word, and as a result, the eternal truth. And the truth was an internal matter, which the travelers on the path would enjoy every step of the way, to the extent that their fortune and efforts would allow; and mystical knowledge would open up to them like a flower, or dawn, layer by layer. Truth was there, just like God and the sun, and the wayfarer needed to wipe clean the dust or stains from his mirror to see its manifestation as clearly as he could. The stages and levels of discovering mystical knowledge would blossom internally in the wayfarer.

As he reaches new stages, and new levels of mystical knowledge dawn in him, with the passage of time, our Hafez completes the degrees of “knowledge of the word and wisdom”² and acquires the magic of the word. The essence of the word, however, “is no more than one point”³ that the poet has reiterated in every language; but what he says is not a repetition of what has been repeated, since every time it is in a different arena and at a different level, and every time he has found and then uncovered that singular truth in a different context. Hence, in this study, the Divan of Hafez has been viewed as a singular and complete whole, like an intrinsically organized garden and an inherently stable firmament, not as an anthology of miscellaneous poetic ideas that are arranged side by side in the form of scattered ghazals.

Looking at the Divan of Hafez in this way, the ghazals can be considered small flowerbeds, heavenly bodies, or limbs and organs of a living body, each of which is in its proper place, like “lines, moles, eyes, and eyebrows.”⁴

A garden and firmament can be seen from within, not from without. Hence, with this perception, the Divan does not constitute an “object” in front of us. One must find a way into it. One can make an excursion into the garden, and one can travel—like light—in the firmament. In order to understand and perceive the garden and the firmament, however, one cannot open them up and examine each piece separately, because then there would remain neither a garden nor a firmament. All that would remain is a heap of fragments.

If we consider the ghazals to be the limbs and organs of a living body, these small flowerbeds and “forms” are no longer useless and distinct, like the beads from a broken string. They are linked to one another, and hence, they have meaning in and of themselves. Searching for these links would perhaps provide us with a path to the intellectual structure of the Divan, the map of the “garden” and design of the “firmament,” and contemplating the warp and weft that form the basic foundation of the ghazals might perhaps provide us with a clue to the workings of the imagination of the poet. After all, the foundation of every ghazal is built on the basis of a design, and every form on the basis of an image.

If we view the entire Divan as a living phenomenon, we must then search for the ways to observe and become familiar with it within the “phenomenon” itself; we must assess it from within and become familiar with its mechanisms and how its components function within each other in order for our internal excursion to be more illuminating and insightful than an observation from outside. For instance, if we are able to fall like a drop into the veins of this body, we might be able to move through it with the blood in circulation and the movement of its systems.

Of course, here and there and when relevant, this “phenomenon” has been placed in the context of history, society, and the world in comparison to other things, such that we can occasionally take an external look at its body and its surroundings and see its “meaning” in relationship to other “phenomena.” Nevertheless, following that perception, the method of observation is fundamentally phenomenological.

Blessed by the presence of Hafez, the garden or the firmament is within our field of vision. If we want, however, to find our way toward the design of a thought process through the “small flowerbeds” or “images,” or if we want to formulate a mindset through the Divan and make it “formable” so that it can be perceived, inevitably, the excursion and observation itself must have a system and a plan; otherwise, the observer will be lost in his distraught wandering and futile action.

The poet has provided us with the signs and trails—ghazals—for our excursion in this garden or traveling in this firmament; but we ourselves must find the sightseeing paths. From one flowerbed to another and from one image to another, each one of us finds his own path, and anyone who comes across the Divan of Hafez has his own relationship and experience with it.

The path of this treatise is a journey and a quest from darkness to light and back to darkness, from incomplete to complete to incomplete, and from man to God to man: from friend to friend! At the beginning, we will talk about the creation of light and the enlightened of the world, about the cup, wine, the tavern, and the Magian elder. Then there is a chapter about the gravitation of the mystic follower toward the mystic leader, about our gravitation toward Hafez and Hafez’s toward the Magian elder, about the wish to flee and to stay within oneself. Then comes love, which is the impetus for being and the substance of existence and nonexistence. Being in the abode of nature and experiencing it fervently and also finding a way to the “hereafter” is the topic of another chapter. Then there is a contemplation of human ethics that bestows light upon the world and a contemplation of social man, who despite attachment to living with others does not become helpless in the trap of social events and flies beyond them. The conclusion is on poetic creation, an internal quest that uncovers its existence in poetry and becomes external. Here the conversation has to do with going beyond the self to reach the essence of the self, for the self to blossom and arrive at the friend, to depart from the self and fly to the alley of the friend!

Hence, this treatise is a journey from divine creation to poetic creation. In the first creation, the poet is “present,” and in the other, God is “present.” Two friends witness the conception of existence, the evolving and being of each other.

But because the friend of our Hafez, both within man and also outside him, is of two different worlds, the person who seeks to benefit from the poet to reach the alley of his own friend must bring to his imagination an ideal of absolute perfection. We are not talking about believing in a God who is standing there watching you. But if a person is unable to contemplate God in his own imagination, even if he takes many sips of the pure wine of the poems, he will not gain access to the entirety of the garden of Hafez and will not share his secret. In contrast, for those who consider the poet to be a “liberated” mystic or a superficially faithful believer and who then turn his poetry into a lifeless corpse, the Hafez of such readers does not reach beyond the level of a rend, a free-spirited libertine, who is the enemy of falsity and injustice. He would be perceived as an ethical social man, and many of his other dimensions would remain hidden.

This book is the travel diary of a traveler to the alley of the friend. On this journey, the couplets and ghazals have served as guiding stars, and the traveler has followed one and then another to complete his path. Even though the stars come from the friend, since I have chosen the path myself and whenever I have wished, I have paused by a shrub or a flower and rested alongside a meadow, and sometimes instinctively traveled and revisited the paths taken all over again. Since I have ridden on the wings of my own imagination, the value of this book is no more than that of a travel diary of a traveler. In other words, this is only one of the windows through which one can view the “garden” of Hafez. No doubt, one can shed other lights on this “firmament” and undertake other journeys of exploration.