Hafiz and His Contemporaries: Poetry, Performance, and Patronage in Fourteenth-Century Iran. Dominic Parviz Brookshaw (London: I. B. Tauris, 2019). Pp. 392. $40.95 paper. ISBN: 978-0755638345

Abstract

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw ’ s study of Hafiz and the poets ‘ Ubayd Zakani and Jahan Malak Khatun is a well-researched, insightful, and detailed analysis of how Hafiz relates to these two major colleagues and the extensive culture of Persian literature. Brookshaw approaches the work of Hafiz through discussion of the poet ’ s patrons, his use of genres and motifs, intertextuality with Arabic poetry, perspectives on religious devotion and worldly activities, and his allusions to kings, heroes, prophets, lovers, and locations. Brookshaw observes that in an anthology composed, probably in Shiraz, the home of Hafiz, at around the time the poet died, his poems are included with poems by predecessors and contemporaries. In particular, the book has the same number of poems by Hafiz and the poet Jalal Yazdi, which suggests that Hafiz was well known, and perhaps the anthologist or his patron viewed Hafiz and Jalal as equivalent in some way. Although the present volume focuses on the examination of poems in the broader cultural context of Persian literature, this kind of social context is a welcome contribution, as one sometimes gets the feeling that the poet Hafiz descended from heaven because of the unique position that is traditionally attributed to him. Brookshaw seeks to explain one possible contributor to this: the intense intertextual relationship between Hafiz and the later poet Jami. Brookshaw ’ s strategy for interpretation of these texts, whose variants and layers of meaning sometimes make a clear understanding elusive, is to engage with the recurring question of the order of lines in a sensible way in the introduction, again with recourse to solid research on the social context of Hafiz ’ s poetry. He suggests that the large amount