Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation.

Aiber and Don Makon

an introduction with

Mohamed Ali of Persian Poetics. It is very good to see you. It's very good to see you. It's been a while.

It has been. It's almost been like a year, I think, since we recorded something probably.

Yeah, that's right. And now we're back with the first Hafez poem that we're doing together.

I'm super excited about this. This is actually, I asked Muhammad Ali to choose a poem, a Hafez poem that would be relatable,

empowering, exciting, energizing. and I think he picked the absolute

perfect one, which we're calling Abir and Don Makhan, because that's the first three words,

and we're going to go over exactly what that is.

But Muhammad Adi, do you want to tell us, let's start with a little bit of a background on

Hafez and what Hafez means to you and to Iranians?

Absolutely. So I'll give you first the academic kind of nerd side of Hafez, which is what I focus

on, and then I'll talk about what most Iranians can probably relate to when it comes to

Hafez. Hafez is living in 13th century, or 14th century, I should say, Iran.

And Iran is a very tumultuous time, and especially his native Shidas, sees a lot of kings

coming and going and what you could call civil strife, civil war, a lot of instability.

And during his lifetime, he also lives under a very, you could call him tyrannical.

Maybe that's a bit of a modern idea or way of thinking about the leader, but a very tyrannical

kind of leader who has an appetite, similar to the modern Iranian government, for applying

religious law very harshly, which was a basically departure from the norm. Most sultans or leaders

in his day were famous for being impious, right? They were warriors, they were warlords, they were

...