Hafez

Shams al-Din Mohammad, known as Hafez, perfected the Persian ghazal — layering wine, love, and defiance of hypocrisy into lines of impossible music. Centuries later his Divan sits in nearly every Iranian home, opened at random to seek an omen.

To open the Divan and read a verse as an answer — the faal — is a living ritual that binds a whole culture to a single poet. No other literature has quite this.