The Miracle of Hafez
Self-Written Memoirs of Mohammad-Mehdi Oghabi
Machine Translation edited by Mandana Karimi
2026-08-25
We were in the command tent of the Martyrdom Company (Gorohan-e Shahadat), on the banks of the Karkheh River. Reza (Gholamreza) Akbari (martyred) was the company commander, and it was the last day of Ramadan, the eve of Eid al-Fitr.
Hassan Bakhtoo (martyred) pulled a book out of his bag and said, "Let's do a divination with Hafez and see what he has to say."
Ali (Mehran) Bolourchi (martyred) jumped up and said, "What's Hafez? Open the Quran, and see what God has to say."
A heated argument broke out about the Quran versus the Divan (Hafez's collected poems).
I just watched; I was in love with the tug-of-war of their conversation.
Reza was the god of debate, seemingly in love with it—he could pull a topic for argument out of a blank wall and stir up a commotion. He had no rival but Javad Asgarian, who was not there at the time.
After a few minutes, I said just one sentence: "Now let him open it, and let's see what comes out."
With everyone's agreement, Hassan Bakhtoo opened the Divan "in front of everyone's eyes" (I said this phrase and put it in quotation marks so that no one could claim he had pointed at that page or had slipped his finger between the pages of the Divan) and recited:
"It is the night of union, and the letter of separation is done
Peace be upon it until the break of dawn"
Remember, I said at the very beginning that it was the eve of Eid al-Fitr.
The tent suddenly went dead silent.
If a mosquito had flapped its wings, you could have heard its flight.
Suddenly, Bolourchi leaped up shouting, snatched the Divan from Bakhtoo's hands and said, "Give it here..." No one could overpower him to take the book back; book in hand, he fled from one side of the tent to the other.
There are a thousand things to say about this, but now is not the time to write them.
Search for the first hemistich of this very opening line (matla' al-ghazal) on Google yourself, so you can savor the rest as well.
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