Religion of Love of Hafez of Shiraz

RELIGION of LOVE of HAFEZ of SHIRAZ Selected Poems Translation & Introduction, Paul Smith "The 'religion' of Hafez was the love of God in human form and beyond all form, and this 'religion' Hafez proclaims in all his poetry, and this 'rel?igion' Hafez lived throughout his life. To try to put Hafez into a box labelled this or that 'religion' is an impossible task because God is impossible to classify; God can only be lived and 'religion' is the creation of man, and God is the Creator of all of mankind." I first wrote this in 1986 after I had spent 12 years translating the complete 'Divan of Hafez'. Thirty years and many hundreds of books on the great Sufi & Bhakti poets later and after composing a Life of Hafez and many Plays & Movies etc. on him... I have felt the need to take from all of the ghazals in his Divan hundreds of his poems on love that he experienced from human love as a husband, father and lover of his Muse Shaikh-i-Nabat and as a lover of his Spiritual Master Mahmud Attar, to the Divine Love of a Perfect Master, or God in Human Form which he became about ten years before he passed on and which make up about half of his poems. 'Don't place your foot down in street of Love without a Guide: by myself, for myself, a hundred moves I willed, it wasn't to be. Fate decreed Love for me... wrote it on my forehead: whatever Fate has written is impossible to wipe away.' Hafez. Introduction: Life, Spirituality & Poetry, Notes, Selected Bibliography. Large Format Paperback 7" x 10" 281 pages. Goethe: "In his poetry Hafez inscribed undeniable truth indelibly He has no peer "Gertrude Bell: "It is as if his mental Eye, endowed with wonderful acuteness of vision, had penetrated into those provinces of thought which we of a later age were destined to inhabit."Meher Baba: "There is no equal to Hafez in poetry. He was a Perfect Master ... His Divan is the best book in the world because it engenders feelings which ultimately lead to illumination." Paul Smith (b. 1945) is a poet, author and translator of many books of Sufi poets of Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Turkish and other languages including Hafez, Sadi, Nizami, Rumi, 'Attar, Sana'i, Jahan Khatun, Obeyd Zakani, Mu'in, Amir Khusrau, Nesimi, Kabir, Anvari, Ansari, Jami, Khayyam, Hallaj, Rudaki, Yunus Emre, Seemab, Jigar, Iqbal, Ghalib, Lalla Ded, Ghani Kashmiri, Hali and many others, and his own poetry, fiction, plays, biographies, kids books and twelve screenplays.For all books go to: amazon.com/author/smithpa