Biography
Shams-ud-din-Muhammad was a 14th century Persian poet and Sufi master, and he remains one of Islam’s most celebrated poets. Hafiz means “he who has memorized the Qur’an.” Little is known about his life, but he was a court poet, a rascal-mystic who despised conventional piety, and the author of Divān-i-Hafiz, a classic in the literature of Sufism. Divān collects Hafiz’s radiant lyric poems of sorrow, loss, love and intoxication, and consists mainly of ghazals, odes, occasional poems, and poems written in couplets. Today in Iran, Hafiz remains far more popular than his famous predecessor, Rumi, and his words are kept alive in common proverbs.