Man Az Sharab O Saqi

The repentance from wine — tawba — is a recurring move in Persian ghazal, and so is its renunciation. Hafiz in particular cycles between promise and retraction, using the comedy of the repeatedly broken vow to undermine the premise that wine and the spiritual life are incompatible.

Man Az Sharab O Saqi names its subjects with precise inventory — 'from wine and the cupbearer and the goblet and the joy' — and then announces that the speaker has repented of these a hundred times and will not repent again. The reason given is dignity: 'I will do nothing more unworthy of my dignity.' The argument reverses the expected moral: continuing to drink is more dignified than the repeated broken promise of stopping.

Ahmad Zahir's relationship to this material was as a singer who grew up in the Persian classical tradition and understood the wine poem's double register — literal celebration of alcohol, and Sufi allegory for spiritual intoxication. He could inhabit both without choosing between them.