Hafez wrote poetry so beloved in Iran that his collected works sit in nearly every household and are used as a fortune-telling oracle — you open the Divan at random and the poem you find is your answer. He survived under tyrannical rulers by encoding his subversive messages in love poetry so beautiful that the powerful could not tell whether he was praising God, mocking them, or celebrating wine. He has been dead for six hundred years and remains the most quoted poet in the Persian-speaking world.

This episode traces Hafez from his Shiraz childhood through the patronage and persecution of successive rulers, the coded poetry that disguised dissent as devotion, and the oracle tradition that keeps him alive in Iranian daily life.

• Hafez's Shiraz origins and the education in Quranic recitation that gave him his pen name
• The co ...