A POPULAR but unauthenticated story suggests that Hafiz Shirazi, the legendary Persian poet, was a soothsayer and clairvoyant.

The story goes that Ghiasuddin, sultan of Bengal, had three favourite concubines who helped him bathe.

The girls were named Sarv, Gul and Lala. Other royal mistresses envied and secretly derided by calling them salaasa-i-ghassaala, or three washers.

Once in an ecstatic mood, the sultan composed a poetic line that said: Saaqi hadees-i-sarv-o-gul-o-lala mi ravad But he could not compose the second line. Court poets were asked to compose a befitting second line but none could do it. So the sultan sent his line to Hafiz of Shiraz with a request to complete the couplet by composing the second line. Legend has it that Hafiz had written back an entire ghazal and the second line read: Veen bahs ba salaasa-i-ghassaala mi ravadHow could Hafiz know of those three girls while in Iran, more than a thousand miles away? Of course, the ghazal is very much part of Hafiz`s divan, but we don`t have any proof to believe that the first line was composed by Sultan Ghiasuddin, except the hearsay reproduced in some works on Hafiz.

Secondly, term salaasa-i-ghassaala is also used for three cups of wine, traditionally drunk in the morning, to wash out impurities from the body and worries from mind and Hafiz meant those three cups, not those three washers.

But some insist that the story is true and their argument is that in the last distich of the ghazal Hafiz refers to `Sultan Ghias Deen`. What lent credulity to the concocted tale of the sultan and three girls is a couplet in the same ghazal that refers to Bengal: Shakkar shikan shavand hame tootiyaan-i-Hind Zeen qand-i-Parsi ke ba Bangala mi ravad (birds of Hind would be singing sweetly as this sweetness of Persian,this ghazal, goes to Bengal).

Another oft-repeated, though not substantiated, event narrates that a king`s precious necklace was lostand could not be traced despite thorough search. The king (whose name is never mentioned) decides to take help from divination. He opens the divan of Hafiz and orders a maidservant to bring the candle to light up the pages. As the maid holds the candlestick, the line that the king randomly selects says: Che dilaavar ast duzde ke bakaf chiraagh daarad (how daring the thief is that holds a lamp).

The maid eventually admits to having stolen the necklace.

Such anecdotal evidences are often quoted tojustify the epithets given to Hafiz Shirazi, such as, lisaanul ghaib, or the tongue of hidden or invisible; and tarjumaanul asraar, or the interpreter of secrets. Some credulous writers have painted Hafiz as a mystic bestowed with divine inspiration.

The belief in Hafiz`s spiritual powers led to the practice of faal, or augury, which involved taking lines from Hafiz`s poetry and interpreting them as having prophetic significance. The practiceof divination from divan of Hafiz remained quite widespread not only in Iran but in the subcontinent for centuries, though the titles given to Hafiz were not meant to denote his ability to foretell the future, they rather signified his sufi thoughts.

It is interesting to note that the custom of fortunetelling through religious and poetic texts was not limited to the East and even in the West such superstitious traditions flourished for quite long. `The practice of foretelling the future by interpreting a randomly chosen passage from a book, especially Bible`, says the Oxford Concise English Dictionary, is called `bibliomancy`.

Rhapsodomancy is another word that mentions such arcane practices of predicting the future through reading some text from a work of poetry.

Some books were written, first in Persian and then in Urdu, for the purpose of performing faal or divination and these books were called faal nama, or book of divination.

Some manuscripts of such Persianbooks, handwritten on quite largesized papers and adorned with miniature paintings, are preserved in some museums and libraries.

Some editions of the divan of Hafiz published in the subcontinent have appended to forewords some charts for performing the divination. This writer repeatedly tried to find a `favourable` prediction with the help of an old edition of the divan of Hafiz, published from Lahore, with Urdu translation (year not mentioned). But some little calculations and jottings revealed that these charts lead to only a limited number of couplets, 21 to be precise, and no matter how many times you try, the same lines would be pointed to, extremely narrowing the range of predictions.

But the popularity of the divan of Hafiz as a book of predictions is amazing, albeit the trend has subsided much and has almost died out.

No doubt Hafiz Shirazi was a great poet and mystic, but he was not a crystal gazer.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com