Shiraz in the Age of Hafez: The Glory of a Medieval Persian City

7. A Very Special Place

7 A Very Special Place Yesterday he promised to be with me, and the wine was in his brain. Today what will he say, and what will be in his head? Shiraz, and the water of Roknabad, and this pleasant breeze Do not fault it, for it is the beauty spot of seven lands. —Hafez Shiraz has always been a special place,whether for its magnificent poetry, its saints, its scholars, or its wine. Of course, the traveler who visits Shiraz today will not find a city resembling the one where Hafez lived, studied, and composed his lyrics.The site is the same,but the physical setting and the social and cultural life have changed radically.The city wall,the gates, and most of the old neighborhoods are gone; the madrasehs have been replaced by a modern university which,until the revolution of 1979,oªered much of its instruction in English. Most of the hundreds of shrines and mosques that once adorned Hafez’s “tower of saints” have either disappeared or lie forgotten in some obscure corner of the city,visited only by antiquarians. What kind of city was Hafez’s Shiraz? First, it was an unstable and violent place, where squabbling, self-destructive drunkards and blood- thirsty hypocrites often ruled,and where the inhabitants saw natural disasters ,sieges,invasions,street fighting,marauding tribes,and arbitrary and ruinous taxation constantly threatening their precarious security and prosperity . Second,it was a “tower of saints” (borj al-owliya), where holy men spent their lives praying and fasting, and devoted their wealth to helping the poor.Third,it was a city of the rendan, full of hedonism and debauchery of every description, where the brothels, the wine shops, and the opium dens did booming business and filled the ruler’s treasury with taxes on the proceeds.Fourth,it was an “abode of knowledge (dar al-elm), where scholars taught and studied all branches of Islamic learning.Finally,it was a brilliant center of Persian culture, producing superb miniature paintings , calligraphy, and an amazing amount of immortal poetry in a few decades. How could one city of about 60,000 create such varied perceptions of society and such a rich culture? One reason was Shiraz’s good fortune in escaping the worst eªects of the Mongol invasions and misrule in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Timely diplomacy and the city’s remoteness from the Mongols’ invasion routes and from their power centers in Azarbaijan protected it from much of the devastation that occurred in northern Iran. At the same time,Shiraz could be a sanctuary for artists, scholars, and poets fleeing the insecurity of other areas. Another reason was the rivalry of Shiraz with other dynastic capitals, such as Herat and Baghdad,in the fourteenth century.This rivalry was a stimulus to cultural life, since a poet or scholar unsuccessful at one court could seek his fortune at another.Even within the Mozaªarid realm,the squabbling princes of the family set up rival courts in the provincial towns of Esfahan,Yazd, and Kerman.Still another reason for this flowering was the temper of the rulers themselves. Shah Sheikh Abu Eshaq Inju, for example, considered himself a Sassanian Shahanshah, and as such encouraged the presence of first-class poets and artists at his court.Although vanity played a large role in the rulers’ patronage of culture in this period, the sources reveal that many of them, such as Abu Eshaq, Shah Shoja, and Shah Mansur, had a genuine appreciation of Iranian art and poetry. But how could one city be all the things we have described—a combination of Athens,Dodge City,the Vatican,and Sodom and Gomorrah— and not break apart under the strain? The answer lay in the social structure of Shiraz, which produced a network of relationships and dependencies A Very Special Place 121 among the ruling elite, the aristocrats, and the common people. Three kinds of overlapping relationships—of family,of teacher and student,and of sufi master and disciple—strengthened the cohesion of the upper classes. For if the members of the ruling elite—the chief justices and the naqibs— only rarely intermarried with the local aristocrats, they also established close relations with the rest of society through the institutions of the madraseh and khaneqah, which were, in theory at least, open to all. Although historians and biographers have carefully documented the relationships...