Deciphering the Text as a Geo-historical Lyric Function

The four geohistorical phases that I have posited above help us reassess the poetic output of post-Mongol Iran, and in particular Hafez’s specific lyric innovations, from the perspective of the relationship between shifting mental geographies and the traditional context of poetry composition and circulation. This endeavor requires a preliminary foray into the question of the formal aspects of a poetic text and the theoretical approaches that contextualize its rhetorical tension within the broader framework of its connections with the external world. The focus on the historicity and the spatial dimension of the text sheds a light on the problem of referentiality as the real conundrum that any study of poetry has to face: does the lyric poem talk about real or imaginary persons, events, and spaces? How do the real and the fictitious interact with each other?

In recent years, several studies have emphasized the relevance of the performative, intertextual, and occasional dimensions of premodern Persian poetry in the effort of offering models capable of tackling those texts from culture-specific critical perspectives. The most recent hermeneutical developments in the field of Persian literary studies focus on the semantic flexibility of the medieval text and argue that its meaning is the product of a negotiation between its inherent rhetorical characteristics and the contexts of its composition, circulation, and reception.

Studies such as Franklin Lewis’ analysis of the plurality of audiences which Sanāʾi’s poetry could potentially address, Julie Scott Meisami’s recognition of a multiplicity of personae in Hafez’s lyric “self,” and Paul Losensky’s unearthing of the intertextual level of signification for the premodern and early modern ghazal have paved the way to theories capable of bridging the gap between the formal and the “referential” aspects of premodern Persian poems.Footnote ⁵

The study of premodern Persian poetry is now ready to face the challenges posed by post-formalistic theoretical turns such as New Historicism and geocriticism, which offer solid theoretical grounds for the consideration of the historical and spatial relevance of the text not only as a rhetorical plot, but also as a “map” variously intersected with the real world. As alluded to above, the very first lines of Hafez’s “Tork-e Shirāzi” create a clear spatial dominant for the entire ghazal. But, as both the inexperienced reader and the specialist may reckon, the map of locales that the poet juxtaposes throughout the text does not help one grasp the general meaning of the poem:

In spite of the extensive research that numerous scholars have conducted in order to decipher the meaning of this ghazal, most analyses have mined in great detail its internal characteristics almost exclusively from the viewpoint of its inherent organic continuity or lack thereof.Footnote ⁷

The identity or the nature of the “Turk” from Shiraz praised by Hafez in his first line is the question that has informed decades of speculations on the meaning of this poem and the historicity of its composition and early context of circulation.Footnote ⁸ What has been challenging the interpretative effort of readers is not the presence of a Tork as such, but the geographical specification of his identity—Shirāzi—which expands the degree of its historicized referentiality well beyond the perimeter of the text.Footnote ⁹

Analyses informed by either exclusively formalistic or historiographical approaches have often failed to account for the fluid mental geography that the text unfolds at the intersection between the possible context of its composition and the interplay that it creates between old and new uses of literary topoi.

In fact, the reference that Hafez makes to specific locales and ethnicities urges the reader to approach the poem alongside its connection with the historicized and geographically informed dimension of external reality. The evocation of cities such as Samarkand and Bukhara, along with the reference to India and Shiraz, outlines a map capable of interplaying with both literary conventions and the geopolitical and historical frameworks that lie behind the composition and circulation of the poem.

Although my investigation does not dogmatically adhere to a systematic literary theory, the interpretative posture that inspires and heuristically informs this research draws upon both formalist (or structuralist) and poststructuralist paradigms. My reading of the texts is primarily informed by the hermeneutical approaches of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Umberto Eco, and Hans Robert Jauss,Footnote ¹⁰ and the concept of “thick description,” initially introduced by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and later adopted by New Historicism as one of its foundational paradigms.Footnote ¹¹

Such hermeneutical assumptions offer the groundwork for my approach to the problem of referentiality in Hafez’s poem from a geopoetical angle, as it tackles the relationship between the rhetorics of literary creation and the representation of geographical spaces from the perspective of their historical setting. Although the term “geopoetics” is yet to find its stable analytical currency in the scholarship, several scholars have recognized its relevance within the relatively new field of geocriticism.

A Geopoetic Perspective

Geocriticism and geopoetics stem from the so-called “spatial turn” which, since the 1960s, has proposed to emphasize the role of spatiality vis-à-vis or in combination with historicity in the analysis of literary texts. Following the assumption that “real spaces and fictionalized spaces coexist on the basis of a common referent,” Bertrand Westphal defines “geocriticism” as the discipline which “probes the human spaces that the mimetic arts arrange through, and in, texts, the image, and cultural interactions related to them.”Footnote ¹² The literary place is thus conceived as a virtual world “that interacts in a modular fashion with the world of reference” according to a broad range of referential possibilities between the text and the external space.Footnote ¹³

In Pour une géographie littéraire, Michel Collot suggests dividing the field of literary geography into parallel subfields which approach the relationship between texts and spaces from the angle of their respective focus on the external referent, meaning, and signifier /form—that is, the three facets of the linguistic sign.Footnote ¹⁴ According to Collot’s subdivision of the orientations that the field of literary geography has acquired, geopoetic approaches tackle the correlation between literary creation and space by focusing on the forms through which they are expressed and circulated: “une approche géopoetique se doit donc d’etre aussi attentive à la forme des textes qu’à leur contenu géographique.”Footnote ¹⁵

Along the lines of these paradigmatic axes—i.e. the correlation between literary creation and space from the perspective of formal representations—Julie Scott Meisami has offered a preliminary insight into the little-studied aspect of urban poetry in Abbasid, Ghaznavid, and Seljuk literature.Footnote ¹⁶ Her ante litteram geopoetic analysis demonstrates how both in the nostalgic mood that imbues Abbasid descriptions of campsites, palaces, and urban spaces, and in the firmly rooted-in-the-present celebration of courtly topographies and geographies that appear in the Persian panegyrics, the poetic representation of cities constitutes a stratified entanglement between the representation of spaces and the recollection of sociocultural and personal memories. The mention of a city in a premodern literary text does not correspond to the mimetic transcription of external reality, as it rather opens a window into the symbolic stratifications that lyricism projects onto the historicity of the relationship between time, cultural memory, and space within the horizon of codified forms of poetic expression.

In his monograph on the perception of space in the Middle Ages, Paul Zumthor highlights the stereotypically vague and hyperbolically repetitive character of the medieval descriptions of cities, whose accumulation of anti-mimetic qualifications sounds like “a sort of stammering which seems to suggest that such objects [i.e. the cities] are situated beyond the reach of language.”Footnote ¹⁷ Premodern Islamicate geographies and chronicles share with their Western counterparts the emphasis on underlining a city’s aptness to enclose, protect, and make flourish human activities: the landscape of an urban space is to be portrayed not for its own aesthetic sake, but as a symbolic testimony to the power of its rulers and the wealth of its markets.

In the poetic texts, the functionally sketchy portrayal of belletristic and historiographical compositions rarefies even further. And if, as in the examples that Meisami presents, the reference to locales in panegyric poetry still keeps traces of a direct connection between the text and the external world, lyric poetry converts the repetitive staggering into a laconic, scanty, and unpredictable mention of cities by their toponyms alone.

It is precisely within the perimeter of the rhetorical constructions of language that these apparently non-mimetically dry mentions of locales disclose maps that require to be perused through the formal and performative orientations of medieval poetic texts. In such cases, a geopoetic investigation requires the exploration of the rhetorical articulations of a poem with respect to the spaces at which it points, and across the multiple levels of signification that the interaction between literary abstraction and historicity may produce.

The Text at the Intersection between Abstracted Signs and Tangible Spaces

The formulaic, impersonally homogeneous, and abstracted nature of premodern Persian lyric poetry constitutes one of the main challenges posed to the study of this poetic genre. The Persian ghazal is in fact characterized by a high density of preset stock imagery and metaphors describing an abstracted and idealized relationship between the poetic I and a fictitious beloved. The abstractness of such descriptions implies that, on the one hand, the narrative plot of these texts is never as elaborately crafted as the formalistic aspects of the poetic language used by the authors (thus the emphasis is often on how things are said, rather what is said) and, on the other hand, the contents of the poems refer more to the literary tradition set by previous texts and less to historical facts and personal experiences.Footnote ¹⁸

In this regard, Paul Zumthor’s observations on the stereotypical character of amatory poetry in medieval romance languages perfectly apply to the lyrical tradition of premodern Iran: such strictly codified texts rely on a concatenation of topoi and formulae whose main referent is the literary tradition rather than the external, particular world of history and biographical experience.Footnote ¹⁹

Hence, from our modern perspective—especially after the confessional watershed of Romanticism—the main critical problem that we face when approaching this kind of poetry is the nature of its referentiality—that is, the relationship between the text and any extratextual reality to which the texts may refer, we think they may refer, or we want them to refer. Not only does the authors’ individuality turn out to be a “non-essential factor of their works,”Footnote ²⁰ but also the space and the time portrayed by the text stem from an abstracted suspension that does not fully coincide with the biographical, geographical, and historical world in which the poem is composed and circulated.

Nevertheless, the performative aspect of Persian lyric poetry causes its formulaic and non-mimetic character to interact with the extratextual reality along patterns that deserve to be carefully explored in order to develop a more critically informed approach to the study of this literary heritage in its historical and geographical context. As emphasized by Culler in Theory of the Lyric, the relationship between the self of the lyric—the lyric persona—and the external world (including the authors of the poems themselves) is a question that is constitutive of the genre and requires to be addressed vis-à-vis both its grammatical and performative dimensions.Footnote ²¹

It is the performative possibility of the lyric that anchors its abstracted deictic dimension to a constant renewal of its contextual meaning on the basis of the framework in which the text is circulated and enacted. This is the angle from which one ought to read Hafez’s reference to his own poetic performance (“You have sung a ghazal and threaded pearls; come, sing sweetly”) and combine the hic et nunc that it generates with the mention of locales and ethnicities that are either codified, partially codified, or uncodified.

In order to apply Culler’s cogitations on the lyric to the study of Persian amatory poetry and combine his multifaceted paradigm with Zumthor’s approach to medieval performative abstractedness, I suggest resorting to a functional repartition of the poetic text into four interconnected levels that constitute both the deep structure of a poem and its contextual, external, and concrete possibilities of meaning. The textual repartition that I suggest is a simplification of the generative model of Greimas’ semiotics, according to which all texts can be stratified into different levels of abstractness: from a shared deep structure constituted by basic abstracted units to the surface of the text as it appears to the eyes of the reader.Footnote ²² The scheme that I propose divides the text into four strata:

1. 1. Deictical abstraction. It is the grammatical foundation of all kinds of referentiality: personal pronouns (“I,” “you,” “he/she,” “they,” etc.), locatives (“here,” “there”), and temporals (“now,” “tomorrow,” “yesterday,” etc.).

2. 2. Typological definition. It is the stratum in which the grammatical articulation of the text acquires the shape of the types that constitute the genre within its tradition. It can typify the pronouns of the grammatical foundation of the text and turn them into figures such as “the lover,” “the beloved,” “the garden,” “the alley,” “the night of the encounter,” “the morning of separation,” “the city,” etc. Such specifications of the abstracted deictical structure contribute to the formation of genres, and from the viewpoint of the mechanisms of reception, they orient the reader within a specific horizon of semantic expectations.

3. 3. Negotiated signification. This is the level in which the semi-abstracted typological definitions of the previous stratum acquire negotiated specifications, such as gender, ethnicity, physical descriptors, and rhetorically dense mentions of locales, regions, and cities. The downy beard of the beloved, for example, emerges as a rhetorical specification for the object of desire’s gender and age. The Turkic ethnicity of the beloved, or his Central Asian origins are also elements of specific signification, whose appearance in the literary canon derives from gradual negotiation between the external world and the poetic tradition. The abstracted typological definitions of the previous stratum acquire specific attributes through a process that is informed partially by fluctuations in the creative trends across several decades or centuries, and partially by contextual contacts between literary practices and historical events or sociocultural scenarios.

4. 4. Referential possibilities. This is the level in which the text (or parts of it) adheres to the external world. The function of referentiality can be explicit and infratextual when a person of the real world, a place, a specific date, or historic event are mentioned. However, in principle, any non-explicitly referential element of the text can potentially signify elements of the external world in their historical setting as a result of the use that author and audiences make of the texts in question.

According to this model, the expression “Shirazi Turk” in Hāfez’s poem can be analyzed through the following generative strata of meaning:

1. 1. Deictically speaking, the “Shirazi Turk” is an ungendered third person singular pronoun: he/she. In this poem, the referential potential of the use of deictics is reinforced by the author’s mention of his own poetic performativity, which emphasizes the “now and here” dimension of the composition.

2. 2. From a typological perspective, the expression corresponds to the function of the “beloved,” or object of desire, grammatically ungendered, but conventionally and implicitly perceived as a male presence.

3. 3. The negotiated specifications emerge from the semantic surface of the text. In this case, the beloved is represented as an ethnically Turkic individual who resides in or originates from Shiraz. A further clarification is in order here: while “Turkic” is an attribute commonly associated with the beloved in the stock imagery of premodern Persian lyric poetry, “shirazi,” as a marker of a specific geographical identity, does not belong to a codified set of descriptive topoi that are congenital to the early development of this genre. This means that, as I shall elaborate in the section on the symbolic relevance of Shiraz as a literary chronotope, the attribute “Shirazi” as a negotiated specification belongs to an uncodified topos that, in the history of Persian ghazal, emerged between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. The coexistence of codified and partially uncodified elements in the expression “Shirazi Turk” opens a window into the adherence of this poem to the external world in its historical context.

4. 4. The referential possibilities of a given expression are potentially unlimited, as they depend on the contextual uses of the text. However, as I shall argue below, any deviation from the traditionally codified set of images that define the norm of lyric composition in premodern Iran constitutes a preferential point of access to the extratextual space of the text. As highlighted above, the partially uncodified attribute “Shirazi,” in association with the conventional “Turkicness” of the object of desire, generates a deviation from the traditional imagery that emphasizes the relevance of Shiraz as a geohistorical setting and the political dimension of the poem’s context of reception.

The stratified generative model that I propose is designed to account for both the polysemic aspect of medieval poetry and its fluid adaptability to contexts in which the text signifies according to its temporary relationship with the external world—i.e. the virtually unlimited possibility of the medieval text to “allude to and suggest real things.” This first piece of evidence that stems from this fourfold repartition of the strata of a text is the deep gap between the grammatical indexicality of the first level and the referential aspect of the fourth stratum. As shown with the example of the “Shirazi Turk” phrase as a codified/uncodified attribute of the beloved, the gap between abstracted indexicality and historicized, spatialized referentiality is the space in which the poet engages with a rhetorical negotiation between the literary canon and the historical context in which he composes, delivers, and circulates his text.

It is possible to compare the mixed level of codification of the expression “Tork-e Shirazi” in the first line with the uncodified mention of locales such as the Roknābād stream, and the gardens of Mosallā, which are mentioned in the second line (“for in Paradise you’ll not find the banks of Roknābād’s stream, or Mosallā’s rose garden”), and whose absence from the negotiated imagery of the classical ghazal points at their potential for a high degree of referentiality with respect to extratextual historical reality. This high density of referential stratification shows that this poem displays a sedimentation of conventional literary motives intertwined with references to events and places whose semantic value is simultaneously figurative and literal. Furthermore, although Samarkand, Bokhara, and India belong to a fairly common codified imagery, the juxtaposition of their mention to partially codified or uncodified locales such as Shiraz and its specific urban sectors orients their rhetorical function towards a higher degree of historicity.

Such a remarkable juxtaposition of markers of performativity, conventional images, and uncodified geographical references calls for a serious evaluation of the historiographical possibilities of referentiality that surrounds this specific poem. Considering that historiographical readings of this ghazal are almost as old as its second generation of readership, the space of historical reference is the first terrain within which it is worthwhile to test the relationship between the “Tork-e Shirāzi” ghazal and its extratextual dimensions. It is the historical framework in which the Central Asian conqueror Timur (Tamerlane in the Western sources, d. 1405) made his first appearances on the Iranian plateau that canalizes the initial reception and circulation of this ghazal as the product of an emerging Timurid political and cultural legacy.

Reception and Historicity

The historical referentiality of the “Tork-e Shirāzi” ghazal is attested to since the very first decades following Hafez’s demise. It seems that very few among Hafez’s contemporaries imitated this ghazal through the widespread practice of “poetic response” (javāb), whilst the poem soon became the model for imitations produced by several Timurid poets, such as Boshāq Atʿameh Shirāzi, Jāmi, ʿAli Shir Navāʾi, and Albaseh, among others. This fact implies that its circulation may not have started until the last decade of the fourteenth century.Footnote ²³

According to Qāsem Ghani, “in all likelihood, ‘Shirazi Turk’ is a reference to Soltān Zayn al-ʿĀbedin, son of Shāh Shojāʿ, as Shāh Shojāʿ’s mother belonged to the Qarakhitays of Kerman.”Footnote ²⁴ Is this argument based on ethnicity strong enough to consider the “Tork-e Shirāzi” ghazal as a panegyric addressed to one of the last Mozaffarid princes? A partial historical corroboration for this hypothesis can be found in the belletristic sources that relate the circulation of this ghazal to Timur’s descent upon Fars. The conquest of Shiraz, which “was preserved from destruction thanks to its peaceful surrender,” is thus described by the Timurid historian Sharaf al-Din ʿAli Yazdi:

Timur sojourned in Shiraz for two months, and his initially peaceful relationship with the Mozaffarid princes who succeeded Zayn al-ʿĀbedin might have offered Hafez an opportunity to encounter the Central Asian conqueror. In fact, Anis al-nās, a little studied “mirror for princes” completed by Shojāʿ Shirāzi in 1426 at the court of the Timurid prince Ebrāhim Soltān, thus explains the context in which Hafez allegedly composed the ghazal that we are discussing:

The historical framework of this narration is Tamerlane’s first occupation of Shiraz, which occurred on 22 December 1387 (789), in the aftermath of the massacre of Isfahan’s population and two years before Hafez’s death.Footnote ²⁸ The author succinctly describes the appearance of Timur in Shiraz, the subsequent downfall of Zayn al-ʿĀbedin, Hafez’s proximity to the Mozaffarid court (“ahl-e taʾahhol bud”), and the system of tax collection introduced by the new world conqueror descending upon Fars from Samarkand. Such a dense narrative highlights the historicity of Shojāʿ’s account, especially if compared with later belletristic narrations, whose lack of descriptive details made the anecdote of the encounter between Timur and Hafez appear to be the product of imaginative forgery.Footnote ²⁹

Even though the historical veracity of the encounter between Timur and Hafez is yet to be historiographically confirmed, it is important to remember that Anis al-nās was completed only thirty years after Hafez’s death, under the patronage of Timur’s grandson Ebrāhim Soltān, in an environment which made Shiraz one of the leading centers for the assimilation of Timurid political identity into Persian culture. Ebrāhim Soltān (796–838/1394–1435), who encouraged Sharaf al-Din ʿAli Yazdi to compose his monumental Zafarnāmeh, was also the patron of Mohammad Golandām, the first compiler of Hafez’s ghazals.Footnote ³⁰ For this reason, the historical contiguity between Zayn al-ʿĀbedin’s destitution and the initial circulation of the “Shirazi Turk” ghazal is supported by a cultural milieu in which the memory of Hafez’s last days was still alive in the community of all the historians, poets, and intellectuals who, under the auspices of Shāh Rokh’s cultural policies, were ensuring the continuity of the artistic refulgence that had previously characterized Mozaffarid and Jalayerid arts.

From these premises we may conclude that both intertextual and historiographical sources of evidence confirm that this ghazal did not start circulating before the outset of the Timurid influence over Fars—a timeframe that corresponds to what I have recognized as the last phase of the intrinsic geohistory of the text, and which opens with Timur’s establishment of Samarkand as the capital of his nascent empire. As any process that belongs to the sphere of reception of a text rather than to the conditions of its composition, access to the chronology of the circulation of a given poem does not necessarily disclose the precise context in which it was first composed.

In principle, one may wonder whether Hafez could have composed the “Tork-e Shirāzi” ghazal decades before its well-documented early Timurid circulation (i.e. after 1370).Footnote ³¹ However, considering that Hafez is the only poet who refers to Samarkand (on three occasions, including the “Tork-e Shirāzi,” and, as I shall elucidate, in contexts involving strong political overtones) among all the lyric poets who flourished in Shiraz between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, his peculiar attention towards the Central Asian city can only be explained if analyzed against the relevance it acquired once it became the capital of Timur’s expansionistic project. Last but not least, the “Shirāzi Turk” line traces a parallel between the intangible value of the beloved’s affection and the tangible worth of “Samarkand and Bukhara” as centers of accumulation of material wealth. Therefore, any discussion on the tangible worth of these two cities cannot avoid taking into account the urbanistic renaissance—after almost two centuries of economic and cultural decadence—that took place only upon Timur’s intervention.

From Abstracted Deictics to the Historicity of Dynamic Geopoetics

Shojāʿ’s account offers glimpses of a plausible historical truth: it shows the phenomenology of the written and oral transmission of Hafez’s ghazal in Shiraz and points towards the historical occurrence of text composition as a sociopolitical communication. Hafez’s “Shirāzi Turk” presents an internal structure in which the abstract stock imagery that characterizes the classical Persian ghazal interacts on several levels with the external reality: the poem refers to specific historical circumstances where the relationship between Hafez, the late Mozaffarid rule, the advent of Timur, and the political role played by the poetic discourse are directly involved. Although all evidence deriving from the “thick descriptions” provided by the historiographical sources conjures up the time and environment of Timur’s campaigns in Western Iran, the historical identity of the literary persona of Hafez’s “Shirāzi Turk” belongs to a space of indetermination that the text cannot further disclose for us.

It is within the space of this very historiographical indetermination that the geopoetic dimension of the poem offers useful analytical angles to scale back to its deictical level and recognize how the mention of specific locales tells us about the politics of the performative context in which the ghazal was composed. The spatial dimensions of Persian lyric poetry are yet to be fully studied and understood, but there is enough evidence to argue that when a poet mentions in his ghazal the specific place where he resides, he is performing a speech act that would usually imply a celebratory function. In such cases, the encomiastic function of the poem is emphasized by the use of linguistic markers that highlight the performative context.

In this poem, for instance, the setting of Shiraz is stressed by mentioning the most typical locales of the capital of Fars: the river Roknābād and the gardens of Mosallā. Eighty percent of Hafez’s poems that mention Shiraz contain either a direct or indirect reference to a king or a prince. At the same time, in all of them the poet praises his own poetic talent (“You have sung a ghazal and threaded pearls; come, sing sweetly”).Footnote ³² From this we can argue that when Hafez mentions Shiraz, an encomiastic or celebratory function is implied and underlined by the performative context in which the poet describes himself at work.

Even though, as previously noted, the expression “Shirazi Turk” opens uncodified windows of referentiality, it first appeared before Hafez’s time, in a line by Saʿdi of Shiraz (fl. thirteenth century), in whose poetry, too, every mention of Shiraz or Fars implies a reference to a political background:

No one will ever see as much violence from the Khatay Turks

As what I suffer from the hand of the Shirazi Turk.Footnote ³³

In this couplet, the expression “Tork-e Khatāʾi” (the Turks from Khatay) is a poetic abstract topos juxtaposed with an extratextual reference contained in the non-topic, uncodified expression “Tork-e Shirāzi.” The specification “Shirazi” creates a historically determined environment for the literary topos of the “turkicness” of the beloved. In fact, as pre-announced by the mention of a “Sāheb-e nāz” in the second line of the ghazal, in the last line Saʿdi introduces a political element:

Don’t act like the Sāheb-e Divān when

You push Saʿdi away from your sight.Footnote ³⁴

We can infer that the entire ghazal was dedicated to the Ilkhanid Sāheb Divān (probably Shams al-Din, d. 1284). Saʿdi ‘s “Shirazi Turk” could well be one of the last Atabegs of Fars, who, as descendants of the Salghur clan, which had accompanied the Saljuk sultan Toghril on the migration into Khorasan in the mid-eleventh century, were Turkmen in origin. Nevertheless, it is not unlikely that the poet might be referring to the noyan sent by the Mongol ruler Abāqā, who fell from his position when a group of Shirazi officials conspired against him.Footnote ³⁵

Saʿdi ‘s use of the expression “Shirazi Turk” as an uncodified political innuendo acts as a precedent for Hafez’s usage of the same expression—roughly a century later—in his ghazal. The realm of political referentiality of Hafez’s lines is thus reinforced through the literary representation of Shiraz as a center of regional power vis-à-vis the shifts in geographical perceptions that took place between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As mentioned at the beginning of this study, Hafez’s lifetime corresponded with what we have called the third phase of Shiraz’s geohistorical development in the post-Mongol period. It was in this timeframe that the sociopolitical renaissance of the city coincided with the memory of both its Salghurid magnificence (1230‒64) and its late Mongol decadence (1264‒1335). It is through the juxtaposition of memories of splendor and decline that the process leading to the codification of Shiraz as a literary topos took place.

The “Shirazi Turk” line by Hafez should therefore be read and understood against the multilayered relevance that Shiraz gained throughout the fourteenth century: a pole of attraction for the relationship between poetry and politics in a Persian-speaking context intertwined with a widespread Turco-Mongol sociocultural presence, but also a prismatic literary topos capable of collecting stratified perceptions of the city’s geopolitical relevance across the decades. It is within this framework that a geopoetic approach offers us the chance to read this text as a map attesting to a specific historical moment and a broader diachronic representation of Central Asia and India from the literary vantage point of fourteenth-century Shiraz and its political prestige.

Shiraz as a Diachronic Pole of Geopoetic Negotiation

Right after Hafez’s death, Mohammad Golandām eloquently pointed out that “in a short time the swift camels of Hafez’s world-conquering ghazals reached the remote regions of Turkistan and India, and the litters of his beautiful poems soon conquered both Persian and Arab Iraq, along with Azerbaijan.”Footnote ³⁶ This hyperbolic statement outlines a map describing the political complexity of a territory in which Shiraz—as one the most important cultural and literary polities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—was part of a network of cities and regional powers interlaced by intensive poetic exchanges.

The one and a half centuries separating the Mongol devastation of Baghdad (656/1258) from Tamerlane’s sack of Delhi (801/1398) hosted the emergence of “a multicephalous Islamicate commonwealth that had multiple, often co-existing, centers of political authority and cultural excellence.”Footnote ³⁷ The polycentrism characterizing first Ilkhanid and, later, Timurid polities was to some extent heir of the late eleventh/early twelfth century Seljuk political and cultural model, which resulted from the integration and the mutual acculturation between the nomadic, Turkic-speaking political element and the urbanized milieus of the sedentary Persianate world.Footnote ³⁸ Both in the case of the Seljuk and the Ilkhanid dynasties, the administrative machineries were mostly concentrated in specific cities—namely Isfahan for the former and Tabriz for the latter. But the presence of a network of secondary urban centers, which were active in the transmission of knowledge and the production of scholarly activities—through the cultural competition between local identities—started shaping a new geographical perception of the relationship between spaces and peripheries. With the death of Abu Saʿid Bahādor Khān (736/1335), the collapse of the Ilkhanid state left western Iran in the hands of a plethora of local powers dominated by complex systems of multiple political and dynastic affiliations. The plurality of centers of power contributed to the creation of spheres of control whose borders would constantly shift while multiple actors were trying to impose themselves as the depositaries of post-Mongol legitimate rule.Footnote ³⁹

In 1343, almost ten years after the anarchy following Abu Saʿid’s death, the Injuid Abu Eshāq, by taking absolute control of Fars, the Persian Gulf coast, and Isfahan, reestablished in Shiraz the artistic and cultural splendor that the city had enjoyed until the end of the thirteenth century, under the Salghurid Atabegs.Footnote ⁴⁰ It was in this period (the third phase of Shiraz’s geohistorical trajectory after the Mongol conquest of Iran) that the capital of Fars imposed itself on the Persianate literary arena as a model of cultural, political, spiritual, and aesthetic prominence, which was extensively extolled by the poets of the time, especially as a consequence of the symbolic crescendo inaugurated by Sa‘di during the first and second phases of this process.Footnote ⁴¹

The geographical reorientation of the mindscape that turned Shiraz into the emblem of cultural and spiritual sophistication fostered the emergence of a new thematic ghazal, known as shirāziye, which revolved around laudatory descriptions of the city and its people. A remarkable example of such compositions is a ghazal of Nāser al-Din Shirāzi (also known as Bajjeh or Bajjeʾi, fl. early fourteenth century) whose refrain is “Shirāz”:

Among all the cities of the world, Shiraz is the city of love

For this reason, Shiraz is the constellation of the saints.

For its exceeding splendor, purity, and glory, Shiraz

Knocked down the value of Baghdad and cast away the glory of Egypt.Footnote ⁴²

In one of the last lines of this ghazal Nāser al-Din places Shiraz at the center of a mental geography of beauty, oscillating between literary codified representations of spaces and the historicity of the city’s urban milieu:

Due to its Khotanese-descent beauties, whose hair is Ethiopian,

Shiraz is now as beautiful as a thousand Turkistans, Khotans, and Chinas.Footnote ⁴³

The progressive codification of Shiraz’s renown as a literary topos undoubtedly originated from the association between the capital of Fars and the poetic persona of Saʿdi, perceived and portrayed as the epitomizer of Persian lyric sensibility. The thirteenth-century poet himself contributed to this association by comparing his “Shirazi” literary persona to the sugar imported from Egypt:

Every luxury derives from a mine:

Sugar from Egypt, and Saʿdi from Shiraz.Footnote ⁴⁴

We also owe to Saʿdi the first penetrating descriptions of the beauty of Shiraz, especially with respect to its gardens and its river, Roknābād:

I said to myself that I would travel around the world

To seek freedom from the chains of servitude.

Could I ever find a new abode far from Fars?

Maybe in Syria, Anatolia, Basra or Baghdad?

Nay, what really prevents me from leaving this country

Is the land of Shiraz and the stream of Roknābād.Footnote ⁴⁵

These literary depictions of Shiraz, far from being merely aesthetic, belong to a geographic awareness in which the mention of cities and ethnicities corresponds to the mental representation of old topoi incorporating new geopolitical paradigms. The new impulse gained by historiography and cartography during this period attests to a progressive shift in the perception of the narratives and the spatial representations of the past.Footnote ⁴⁶ From the late thirteenth century onwards, in the wake of Saʿdi’s lyrical innovations, the Persian ghazal became a textual venue in which these new spatial and mental geographies would emerge.

The opposition between Shiraz as a sign in transition towards historicized codification and other territories belonging to well-established literary maps shows the mechanism on which Hafez relied for the semiotic stratification of his own geopoetical discourse. In this poem by Khwāju of Kerman (whom scholars consider as a key transitional presence between Saʿdi and Hafez’s lyricism), the relationship between Fars and Central Asia unearths dynamics of geopoetic referentiality that we could easily compare with Hafez’s “Shirazi Turk”:

Look at that Turk of Bolghār: with bloodthirsty eyes he’s come.

A sun wearing beaver garments: the Tatar sedition has come!

The Holy Eucharist is his face, a byzantine belt his curls

A hundred hearts in his locks are trapped.

The drunkards are bewildered by his eyes, pale is the garden for his face

That idol arrived from Farkhār, Shiraz has become like Turkistan.Footnote ⁴⁷

Farghār, Bolghār, and the cultural references to Christianity belong to stock imagery that does not necessarily refer to any particular extratextual historical reality—thus belonging to a level of meaning which corresponds to what I have called the level of negotiated signification (third generative stratum). However, if Farghār and Bolghār are symbolically associated with the white-faced Turkic tribes settled in Central Asia as well as in the region of Middle Volga, Shiraz holds no allegorical connotations and, as a linguistic sign, it serves as a direct reference to the “here and now” of the poet’s literary performance; that is, the fourth stratum of our generative scheme.

Through this juxtaposition, the mention of Shiraz projects onto the Turkistan-related imagery a further semiotic level, in which the stock topoi belonging to the classical canon are reactivated within a specific historical context that includes Saʿdi’s contribution to the symbolic transition of this city-sign. In the case of Khwāju’s line, the Shiraz/Turkistan opposition underlines the dialectic of power renewal between the vestiges of the Ilkhanid Empire and the affirmation of regional authority in Fars. Similarly, Hafez’s implied comparison between Shiraz, India, and Central Asia opens up multiple semiotic levels oscillating between historicity and literary representations of space. Shiraz, in the Tork-e Shirāzi, shifts from a marker of uncodified referentiality to a negotiated topos which re-semanticizes the semiotic value of Samarkand and Bokhara, and India, as spaces of history in transition. Through the mention of Samarkand, the poem opens a window into what I have recognized as the third phase of the historicized geo-orientation of Shiraz (1370‒98), which inaugurates the process of re-regionalization of the city within the broader framework of the emerging Timurid empire. The lyric mention of these locales is worthy of being reappraised from the perspective of the rhetorical context in which Hafez manipulates their historical perception vis-à-vis their cultural relevance within the early Timurid geographical representations.

The Geographic and Historical Depth of a Rhetorical Device

The geopoetic map that Hafez deploys in his ghazal through the mention of the multilayered value of Shiraz along with other regions of the Persian-speaking world interacts at multiple levels with the literary tradition to which it belongs. Intertextuality is one such level, which juxtaposes the lyric portrayal of the world with the history of rhetorical representations of the same spaces and through similar literary devices.Footnote ⁴⁸

The historicity of the geopoetic value of Hafez’s “Shirazi Turk” line expands the reach of its referential possibilities if we compare it with a verse by Amir Khosrow of Delhi (d. 1325), one of the most important representatives of the Persianate literary legacy of premodern India:

With the renown of his beauty, that idol from Samarkand

Conquered the country of our heart as well as the region of Bukhara.Footnote ⁴⁹

Hafez and Amir Khosrow’s distichs not only share the same rhyming word (“Bokhārā”) and radif (“rā”), but are also constructed according to a virtuosic use of a specific rhetorical device: the morāʿāt-e nazir—literally “the observance of the similar”—by which the poet harmonically juxtaposes within a single line words belonging to the same semantic category.Footnote ⁵⁰ Although this device had already been employed by Arab critics and poets, it was fully developed by Iranian poets in the quest of that harmony and balance (tanāsob) that can be considered as one of the most dominant aesthetic values characterizing Persian classical poetry.Footnote ⁵¹ For a better understanding of this representation, we need to pay attention to the way in which the technique of the “observance of the similar” tunes the different elements of a given line along a harmonic cohesion in which signifieds and signifiers—objects and words, images and sounds—collaborate in the production of a multilayered poetic topography.

By deploying three different semantic classes instead of the one or two usually prescribed by the classical critics, Hafez turns the virtuosic usage of the morāʿāt-e nazir technique into the most prominent rhetorical device of the “Tork-e Shirāzi” line:

1. 1. “Cities” (Shiraz, Samarkand, Bukhara);

2. 2. “Parts of the body” (hand, heart, mole);

3. 3. “Ethnic groups” (Turk, Indian).Footnote ⁵²

As for Amir Khosrow’s couplet, we find the mention of two cities, Samarkand and Bukhara, along with the class of geographical spaces, like keshvar, “country,” and khetteh, “city” or “region.” The similarities between the two couplets are striking, and, rather than highlighting the intention of the author, they shed light on the tension in the interplay between the two texts. The recognition of a correspondence on the rhetorical level enables us to orient the two poems toward the same geopoetic structures and evaluate the specificities of each representation through the value that they project onto the locales that they display.

Shifting Geographies: India and Central Asia through the Filter of Historicized Poetics

The ghazal by Amir Khosrow quoted above appears in his first Divan, Tohfat al-sighar, compiled in 1273, when the author was twenty years old and Ghiyās al-Din Balban was consolidating the political supremacy of the Turkish Slave Dynasty over the Persianized Delhi Sultanate.Footnote ⁵³ Since the first half of the thirteenth century, Iltutmish, one of the founders of the Sultanate as an independent polity, “took care to build up a corps of Turkish slaves known as the Shamsis, whose loyalty was focused on him alone.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Under his successors, they would come to play a more prominent role in the government of the Sultanate. Hence, the young Amir Khosrow, whose father was a Turk of slave origins, and whose mother was an Indian Muslim, during his first years of poetic activity at court might have started expressing his affection towards the Turkish ruling elite of Transoxanian ascendance.Footnote ⁵⁵ In this case, the political implications of the expression “bot-e Samarqandi” are unambiguous: the compound opens a window into the story of the Sultanate and its relationship with Central Asia. In fact, as pointed out by Peter Jackson, “had it not been for the Mongol incursion in Transoxania and Khwārezm, Delhi, Sindh and the Punjab might have been swallowed up in the empire: Chinggis Khan inadvertently ensured that Muslim India would go its own way.”Footnote ⁵⁶

In Amir Khosrow’s couplet, the rhetoric of plundering and conquest associated with Samarkand and Bukhara can be seen as the literary expression of the devastation of the two cities in the aftermath of the Chingizid invasion. Bukhara, for instance, was burned in 1220 and had its population slaughtered. Subsequently, it was plundered several times, and finally sacked in 1276 to such an extent that, according to the Jāmeʿ al-tavārikh (composed by the Ilkhanid historian Rashid al-Din during the first decade of the fourteenth century), it remained uninhabited for several years.Footnote ⁵⁷

People escaping from both cities and seeking refuge southward contributed to the cultural, artistic, and military supremacy of the Delhi Sultanate, where the ruling elites, lacking any local tradition on which to draw, had to get inspiration from the Turco-Persian institutions of kingship of the Samanid and Ghaznavid legacies.Footnote ⁵⁸ Therefore, at the time of compiling his first Divan, the Samarkand and Bukhara mentioned by Amir Khosrow are cities that virtually no longer exist. Rather, they are nostalgic signs of a vanished past, whose intellectual ruins were to become the basis for the construction of Delhi as a new political and cultural ideal, where the interaction between Persian, Turkish, and Indian identities produced a unique and flourishing civilization.Footnote ⁵⁹

The nostalgia for this lost urban splendor also emerges from the pages of Ibn Battuta’s travelogue:

Or, in the case of Samarkand:

In the poetry of Nezāri Qohestāni (d. 1321),Footnote ⁶² Bukhara is referred to as an epitome of destruction and desolation, and the following verses are among the few poetic examples from the early fourteenth century that explicitly mention the Transoxanian city:

For what reason—tell me!—Bukhara has been plundered?

So that these hostile warriors may pillage our heart?

Nothing but disasters, these people have brought to Khorasan:

We must find a remedy, a strategy to appease this calamity!Footnote ⁶³

Was it for plundering and assassination that you came here,

From the other side of the river, to ravage Bukhara?Footnote ⁶⁴

In 1350, ʿAbd al-Malek ʿEsāmi eloquently described the relationship between the magnificence of the Delhi Sultanate and a Transoxiana almost in ruins. He expressed his regret in the passages of his Fotuh al-salatin in which he grieves Mohammad Toghloq’s policy of deserting Delhi and moving the Muslim families to Devigir:

Oh poor city of Delhi, that in the reign of India

Used to be the most beautiful royal court.

Eram’s walls were envious of the outline of its buildings:

Cairo and Baghdad were nothing but its outskirts.Footnote ⁶⁵

A mosque in it like the Beyt al-Haram [of Mecca]

Erected by the kings of Iran.Footnote ⁶⁶ …

The thirteenth/early fourteenth century prideful descriptions of the beauty and the cultural importance of India as a whole, and Delhi in particular, often belonged to a system of comparisons with all the other regions of the Persian-speaking world. An eloquent poetic reflection of such celebrations can be found in the Divan of Hasan of Delhi (1336), one of the most renowned contemporaries and fellow-poets of Amir Khosrow:

If your blasphemous Chinese curls were to attack the Khorasan of my heart

May the India of your hair live long in eternal prosperity!Footnote ⁶⁸

Through the morāʿāt-e nazir technique, the poet turns the bodies of the lover and the beloved into living maps dominated by India. Praises of Delhi abound in almost all Amir Khosrow’s prose and verse works, but one of the most striking laudatory passages can be found in the introduction to his third Divan, Ghorrat al-kamāl, completed in 1294:

In another passage, Amir Khosrow criticizes the Persian spoken in Khorasan and in other regions of Iran, as he deemed it not to be as pure as the literary language used in Transoxiana (Māverā’ al-Nahr), a linguistic purity that qualifies the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara as the sources of inspiration for the Indo-Persian cultural identity.Footnote ⁷⁰

The “Tork-e Shirazi” as a Map for Early Timurid Polities

Amir Khosrow and Hafez, through the device of the morā‘āt-e nazir, represented Samarkand and Bukhara as parallel mirrors of Delhi and Shiraz, respectively, within a topography that is simultaneously literary and historical. Whilst Amir Khosrow mentions these cities in the wake of the dysphoric rhetoric of conquest and subjugation that turns the ephemeral condition of Transoxiana into an analogue of the lost heart (just as, in Hasan’s ghazal, the Khorasanian heart of the lover is dominated by the Indian hair of the beloved), Hafez represents a geopoetical embrace capable of mirroring the Timurid ideals of territorial and symbolic sovereignty as a princely revival encompassing the Ilkhanid imperial model as well as the renown of Mahmud of Ghazna’s eastward aspirations.Footnote ⁷¹

In Hafez’s ghazal, the constant reference to a “here and now” through the use of deictics and the explicit reference to Shiraz and its locales offers a strong point of observation related to a specific historical reality external to the text. From this point of observation the perspective is broad, and it embraces Transoxiana as well as India in the relationship between Fars and the “Persian-speaking Turks who can bestow new life.”Footnote ⁷² Even though Hafez represents the Turks as the ethnic other, his ghazal shows the symbolic acceptance of a sociopolitical and interethnic encounter in which all opposition is resolved by the poetic performance.

However, the confluence between the Persian and the Turkic world is represented here within a map that displays the extension of the Timurid Empire at the peak of its eastward expansion: the Indian campaign is yet to be planned, but Timur’s expansionistic ambitions could have been foreseen at that stage, as his historiographers strongly emphasized the parallels between his enterprises in western Iran of the late 80s and the campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazna.Footnote ⁷³ The “Indian mole,” for which Hafez would trade all the wealth of Samarkand and Bukhara, is a poetic topos that could potentially be seen as an analogue for a geographical object of desire. In the case of Hafez’s poetry, the mention of India acquires special relevance if we consider that the author was certainly aware of the cultural and political contacts between Shiraz and the Tughluqid Sultans of Delhi during the reign of Abu Eshāq Inju, who, in the 1340s, received a delegation sent by Ghiyās al-Din Mohamad Tughluq. The visit of Mohammad Ekhtesān (the private secretary of Ghiyās al-Din Mohammad) to Shiraz was probably the occasion that inspired Hafez to compose at least one ghazal dedicated to the Indian ruler.Footnote ⁷⁴

In the rest of the ghazal, the references to the context of performance (the last verse), as well as a direct quotation from Saʿdi,Footnote ⁷⁵ affirm the supremacy of the Persian poetic language over a space dominated by a Turkish-speaking power. The same ambivalence can be discerned in the penultimate couplet of another of Hafez’s ghazals, which, in the editions published by Qazvini-Ghani (1941), Khānlari (1983), and Ebtehāj (1993), among others, reads as follows:

Rise and let us offer our devotion to that Turk of Samarkand

As from his breeze the sweet fragrance of the Muliyān brook is coming.Footnote ⁷⁶

Many scholars have speculated that in this ghazal the “Turk of Samarkand” could be an allusion to Timur, as it was composed during a political vacuum, or courtly disgrace, when “the king of the Turks does not care about our condition” (“shāh-e torkān fāregh ast az hāl-e mā”).Footnote ⁷⁷ The direct quotation from one of the most famous of Rudaki’s poems, buy-e juy-e muliyān (“The sweet fragrance of the Muliyān brook is coming / the scent of the dear friend is coming”), celebrated by Nezāmi ʿAruzi and imitated by many other authors, from Amir Moʿezzi to ʿObayd-e Zākāni, is a way to find a negotiation between the ethnic otherness of the ruling elite embodied by Timur and the Persian literary identity.Footnote ⁷⁸ Moreover, it should be borne in mind that Rudaki, according to Nezāmi ʿAruzi, composed “Buy-e juy-e Muliyān” in order to praise the beauty of Bukhara and convince the Samanid prince Nasr II Ebn Ahmad (r. 914–43) to return after four years spent in Herat with his attendants.Footnote ⁷⁹ Considering that by the end of the fifteenth century this story was still circulating among biographers and literati,Footnote ⁸⁰ it is quite likely that Hafez, being aware of the anecdote, decided to cite Rudaki’s poem for political reasons, as a way to hint at the relationship between Shiraz and Central Asia. Nevertheless, both Bahāʾ al-Din Khorramshāhi and Saʿid Hamidiyān argue that the association between this ghazal and Timur is unsustainable: the expression “Tork-e Samarqandi” should refer to the poet Rudaki himself, as if Hafez wanted to say that “it is better not to think about the disasters and the sufferings of these times; we should rather read poetry (Rudaki’s poetry, or poetry in general) in order to alleviate our anxieties.”Footnote ⁸¹

However, a strong philological argument could be made against the opinion of the two Iranian scholars. In fact, it is necessary to highlight that while this ghazal has been transmitted with quite a reliable degree of consistency by the twenty-four manuscripts inspected by Neysāri,Footnote ⁸² its third couplet (“Rise and let us offer our devotion to that Turk of Samarkand / as from his breeze the sweet fragrance of the Muliyān brook is coming”) has been recorded in a plethora of variants (twelve, if we consider also the minor syntactical variations) that require closer scrutiny, especially in consideration of their historical implications. It seems to me that the reading chosen by Ghazvini-Ghani, Khānlari, and Ebtehāj—i.e. the direct quotation from Rudaki’s ode—is rather arbitrary, as it appears in only two manuscripts, which are not philologically more relevant than the rest of the manuscript tradition.Footnote ⁸³ The use of the archaism “āyad hami” in all twelve variants confirms that Rudaki’s ode (“Buy-e juy-e Muliyān āyad hami”) surely served as a hypotext for Hafez’s original rendition(s). However, I would be prone to believe that Hafez originally modified Rudaki’s renowned line in order to create a rhetorical interplay between the historical background of the literary tradition and the political events witnessed by his contemporaries in Shiraz. It is the mood and the overtones of such rhetorical variations that should be considered in order to retrieve the kind of message that Hafez was willing to share with his audience. For instance, in five of the twelve variants (eleven manuscripts out of twenty-one), the word “juy” (brook) is substituted by the noun “khun” (blood), thereby establishing two readings supported by some important manuscripts:

As from his lips the smell of the lovers’ blood is coming.

As from his breeze the smell of the Muliyān brook’s blood is coming.Footnote ⁸⁴

With such variants, if the “Tork-e Samarqandi” refers to Timur, is Hafez—by mentioning the lover’s blood or, even more so, the rivers of blood flowing in Central Asia—warning against the arrival of the world conqueror from Samarkand? In this case, the expression “khāter dādan” could imply a bitterly ironic resignation to a destiny that Shiraz could not elude.

The historical link between the expression “Turk of Samarkand” and Timur is also found in another of Hafez’s ghazals:

Do not give your heart to the beautiful ones, Hafez, look at

All the violence that the Turks of Samarkand did against the Khwarezmians.Footnote ⁸⁵

As stated by ʿAbd al-Razzāq Samarqandi in his Matlaʿ-e saʿdayn (1466), this line was composed by Hafez in the aftermath of Timurid devastations occurring in Khwārezm in 1379.Footnote ⁸⁶ In many manuscripts, the allegedly original couplet appears in this form:

The black-eyed ones of Kashmir and the Turks of Samarkand

Are dancing in all their splendor with the poetry of Hafez of Shiraz.Footnote ⁸⁷

Fourteen of the thirty-three oldest manuscripts recording this ghazal contain the first version of the line (“all the violence that the Turks”) reported by ʿAbd al-Razzāq.Footnote ⁸⁸ The wide variety of chains of transmission to which these manuscripts belong (the first one dating from 843/1439), and the fact that in two cases both variants have been transcribed by the copyist within the same manuscript, suggests that ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s rendition of the line might not be spurious. Shafiʿi-Kadkani explains this potentially authentic double authorial rendition by suggesting that it is one of the few cases in which Hafez has re-edited his own text for political reasons: “Hafez, after Timur’s conquest of Fars, probably interpolated this verse as a result of fearing the violent and merciless actions of the Turk of Samarkand.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Regardless of the reasons lying behind this double rendition, we have to accept both variants as the two faces of Hafez’s engagement, during the last dramatic years of his life, at the intersection of poetical and historical events. Thanks to these intersections, we can understand the role played by the mention of cities in the framework of Persian poetry. In this tradition, cities are ambivalent signs: they share with gardens the ideal of reproducing the lost paradise on earth, but at the same time their ephemeral condition is constantly affirmed.Footnote ⁹⁰ Thus, the mention of the name of a city would evoke its material presence, and put it in conversation with the historical and literary reminiscences awakened in the mind of the community of readers.

In Amir Khosrow’s writings, Delhi is the sole stable urban identity, while Samarkand and Bukhara are nothing but fragments of a lost past whose value is given by the symbolic role they played in the history of the Persian civilization. On the contrary, the Samarkand that makes its appearance in the last decade of Hafez’s literary endeavor is a new pole of attraction capable of resetting the entire geopolitical perception of Iran under Timurid rule. In Hafez’s poems, one may discern the dramatic awareness of the threat that the Central Asian city poses to the political independence of Shiraz and the Mozaffarid dynasty.

This last geographical shift—in terms of geopoetical orientation as well as ideologies of power—is reflected in the Timurid propaganda’s terse description of how Timur’s benevolent regard for the city converted the desolation caused by past lootings into a shining model of urban renewal for the entire world:

From the point of view of the rise of Samarkand after 1370 and the gradual downfall of Shiraz, we could consider “Tork-e Shirāzi” as Hafez’s attempt to symbolically undermine the new political centrality acquired by the Central Asian capital and reassure the local elites of Fars about the eternal and blissful glory of Shiraz. The first line of the poem (“Should that Turk from Shiraz take our heart into his hands, / I’d give up, for his Indian mole, all Samarkand and Bukhara”) not only represents the geopoetical map of a new orientation of the Persian-speaking world, but it also represents the object of desire (the ghazal’s abstracted beloved) as a cartographic entity.

Conversely, the second line converts the cartographic logic of the ghazal’s opening into a lyric subjectivity in which the map of the amatory rhetoric turns into the landscape of Shiraz extolled and enjoyed from within: (“O Cup bearer, bring the last of the wine, for in Paradise [jannat] / you’ll not find the banks of Roknābād’s stream, or Mosallā’s rose garden”).

Most interpretations of this line emphasize Hafez’s opposition between the unattainable pleasures of the hereafter and the “here and now” of Shiraz’s lush gardens and running waters, capable of overshadowing the promised pleasures of paradise (jannat). This is certainly one of the recurrent topoi in the entirety of Hafez’s Divan, but the geographical dominance of the “Tork-e Shirāzi” line stresses the spatial relevance of the second line of the poem: the real value lies in the geographical space of Shiraz not only as a cartographic sign on a geopoetic map, but also as a landscape surrounding the subjective perspective of the lyric subject.

By “paradise” Hafez undoubtedly refers to the garden of delights whose detailed descriptions abound in the Quran. However, considering that both the first and the second line of the poem revolve around the discourse on value (the value of Samarkand and Bokhara vs. the Shirazi beloved’s Indian mole, the value of paradise vs. the gardens of Shiraz), it would not be too far-fetched to recognize an implied symbolic parallel between Samarkand and paradise as two sources of sensual wealth incapable of rivaling Shiraz’s glorious landscape.

The parallel between Samarkand and paradise proves even more meaningful if we consider that the topos of Samarkand as an Eden on earth is well-attested in numerous historical sources offering glimpses of Timur’s imperial propaganda. For instance, in the works of Timurid historians such as Sharaf al-Din ʿAli Yazdi, attributes of the likes of “Jannat-masāl” are frequent: “From his [Timur’s] glorious steps, the paradisiac [‘jannat-āyyin’] city of Samarkand caused the envy of the lofty spheres.”Footnote ⁹² Moreover, the sources refer to “paradisiac garden” (“bāgh-e behesht”) as the first (in 1378) of a garland of gardens that Timur ordered to be built all around the outskirts of Samarkand.Footnote ⁹³ Considering the historically attested epistolary exchange between Timur and the Mozaffarid court in Shiraz, it is likely that Hafez had been fully exposed to the imperial propaganda’s representation of Samarkand as a jannat on earth.

If this interpretation holds true, we may conclude that Hafez’s “Shirazi Turk” could ultimately be regarded as the poem embodying the lyric spirit of Shiraz as a proud local community that is aware of the multifaceted stratification of its own past at the verge of an epochal transition: a city caught in the act of pondering upon its own geohistorical destiny, well beyond the lights and shadows of its turbulently glowing post-Mongol path, and vis-à-vis the emergence of a new imperial order, whose final trajectory proves, as the “mystery of time,” inscrutable.