Ketāb-e Ḥāfeẓ: āvā-ye madanīyat Persian 2025

The book Hafez: The Voice of Civility, written by Pirouz Eftekhari, is a scholarly and interdisciplinary effort to reinterpret Hafez beyond the two prevailing readings that frame him either as a purely mystical poet or merely a hedonistic lyricist. Drawing on the humanities, linguistics, and cultural studies, Eftekhari argues that Hafez’s lyricism is, above all, a space for cultivating cultural refinement and shaping a form of “poetic civility.”

The author presents Hafez as a poet who moves along the boundary between lived reality and cultural truth—one who, through an enigmatic and subtly subversive language, stood against religious authoritarianism and the constraints of his time. From within the ambiguity of the ghazal, Hafez opens a horizon for freedom and awareness. In Eftekhari’s view, Hafez is not merely a poet of love and mysticism, but the voice of a civilizational ethos capable of inspiring the reconstruction of freedom and culture in today’s world, marked by violence and extremism.

This work is a valuable and thought-provoking resource for readers interested in Hafez studies, classical Persian literature, cultural studies, and contemporary analytical approaches to Iranian thought.