““Hafez seemed to have the effect of unifying the Iranian people. His poems epitomised the Iranian mindset; passionate and opinionated but laced with humour and a lust for life. His moral and religious messages had elevated him to oracle status, but they sat comfortably alongside admissions of human frailty and decadence, including plentiful references to desire, wine and drunkenness. And just like the twenty-first-century Iranians I had met, from tech-savvy young guns to devout traditionalists, Hafez’s world was a harmonious blend of the mystical and the human, as if no conflict existed between the two.””
