Muslim-Western Cultural Encounter in the Eighteenth Century

The Impact of Hafiz Shirazi’s Poetry on Europe

Abstract

The present paper studies the interface between the dynamics of the Persian poetry as embodied in the poetics of Hafiz of Shiraz and early British Romantic writers in the context of the Muslim-Western cultural encounter in the eighteenth century. The major part of the study is devoted to an interpretation of Hafiz and his ghazals as contained in the writings of the foremost Orientalist Sir William Jones and his lesser known contemporaries who studied Hafizian poetry for the reinvigoration of their national literature. It has been shown that the brilliant ideas of the Sufi poet gave impetus to the burgeoning English Romanticism. Jones’s English translation of the celebrated ghazal of Hafiz known as the Turk-i Shirazi ghazal inaugurated a literary trend later identified as Romanticism. Significantly, many of the present-day scholarly debates on the medieval Sufi poet such as whether to interpret his poems as mystic longings for the Divine Beloved or as profane love lyrics, had already been foreshadowed in the writings of the eighteenth-century British bourgeoisie intellectual writers.

In this context it has been argued that if the British Orientalists’ intellectual endeavours are viewed in the perspective of the post-Saidian re contextualisation of Romantic Orientalism, hardly any corresponding relationship is discernible in the British scholarly interest with Persian poetics and their growing political ascendancy in India. The passion of Jones and his contemporary Hafiz devotees, like Hafiz himself, was also the representative of their age. Moreover, the Hafiz tradition was fully appropriated as well as assimilated in the dynamics of the Indo-Persianate culture of medieval India. Hafiz and his poetics formed an integral part of the collective memory of the Persophonic Indo-Persian intelligentsia, where it remained an important subject of analysis, commentary, and interpretation of the Indo-Muslim cultural elite. The extant manuscripts of the Diwan-i Hafiz and its numerous commentaries throughout the libraries of South Asia attest to the popularity of Hafiz among the educated Indo-Islamic elite. With the establishment of British colonial ascendancy in the late eighteenth century, India served as a ‘pool of information’ for Hafiz and his poetics. Indo-Persian intelligentsia with its collective memory acted as the preserver and transmitter of Hafizian tradition to the West.