Persian Praise of Wine, Not Peace
On the one hand lies wine,
on the other lies piety;
with thy hand in mine
ignore what society
wants you to choose,
and drink from my chalice.
Society’s dues
can bankrupt with malice;
only juice of the grape
drunk with you in my eyes
provides an escape
from its laws and its lies.
Hafez this soberly has stated
in many Farsi versions,
his poetry more highly rated
than peace with Jews by Persians.
Inspired by Hafez (Shams-ud-din Mohammad Hafiz Shirazi)
In “A Bitter Education,” TNR, 4/9/26, Pankaj Mishra writes:
In its quiescence to the West’s war on Iran, India is squandering a precious legacy. Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in The Discovery of India that “among the many people and races who have come in contact with Indians and influenced India’s life and culture, the oldest and most persistent have been the Iranians.” It is the kind of historical fact readily verified by ordinary experience. My grandfather was more fluent in Persian than in any other language; I grew up using Persian words in everyday conversations, eating food that originated in Persia, and listening to music whose most widespread and enduring forms—qawwali and the ghazal—were refined by a medieval poet in Persian.
For nearly a millennium, Persian was the lingua franca of Asia: the language widely used by political and intellectual mandarins and necessary, too, for travelers such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, who both deployed the language in China. Indeed, if Persian nationalism has maintained a profound sense of historical continuity transcending many different political regimes, it is because of its roots in the achievements of an expansive and long-lasting Persian civilization, or ecumene. Translated into many vernacular languages, the poetry and philosophy of Firdausi, Attar, Rumi, Hafez, Sa‘di, Nizami, Ibn Sina, and Nizam al-Mulk assumed a canonical authority across Asia. Rulers everywhere, whether Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist, adopted Persian ideologies of statecraft that, as Richard Eaton writes in India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 (2019), privileged “the notion of justice and connecting economy, morality and politics.”
The flow of ideas and ideologies came even faster in response to the shocks and traumas of the West’s violent domination of Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visiting Iran in 1932, Rabindranath Tagore, who grew up listening to his father recite Hafez, enlisted in the country’s attempt to create a national identity based on its pre-Islamic and pan-Asian heritage….
….my intimate awareness of the many challenges, setbacks, and disasters of postcolonial nation building during the cold war precluded the reflexive Western attitude toward Iran of fear and loathing underpinned by near-total ignorance. In time, I made my own pilgrimage to the tomb of Hafez in Shiraz. Traveling around Iran, I became a beneficiary of the Persian world’s noblest tradition: warmhearted hospitality. Perhaps this explains the desolation and shame I felt when I read about the American torpedoing of the IRIS Dena, an Iranian vessel that thought itself safe in international waters, as it was returning from an international naval exercise at the East Indian port of Visakhapatnam.