Fal-e Hafez
Fal-e Hafez is the Persian tradition of divination with the Divan of Hafez: the book is opened at a random page and the ghazal that appears is read as the answer to a question. In Iran it is a household practice, especially at Nowruz and on Yalda Night.
How the reading is done
The book is held in the hands, the question is framed silently, and sometimes Hafez himself is addressed with a request for a true answer — this formula is traditional. Then the Divan is opened at random and the ghazal on the right-hand page is read in full, not just a single line.
If the ghazal doesn't answer the question, tradition allows reading the next one — it is considered a clarification, the “shahed” (witness). No one consults the book more than twice in one day.
The practice is so widespread that there is a street version: a fortune-teller with a parakeet or canary that picks a card with a ghazal out of a box.
Why Hafez
Hafez of Shiraz (c. 1315–1390) is the central poet of the Persian tradition, and his Divan sits in most Iranian homes alongside the Quran. He earned the title “Lisan al-Ghayb” — “the Tongue of the Hidden” — and that explains the practice itself: his verses are believed to speak more precisely than the author could have intended.
Hafez's ghazals are built to allow several readings at once — romantic, mystical, and social. Because of this, almost any ghazal fits almost any life situation, and that is the secret of the method's staying power.
Why We Don't Have a Calculator
Random selection from roughly five hundred ghazals is easy to program. The difficulty lies in the texts: for the divination to make sense, you need a literary translation with commentary — a ghazal in a literal Russian crib doesn't work as an answer, because it loses the ambiguity everything rests on.
Russian translations of Hafez exist, but most are under copyright, and their quality varies widely. Publishing a random literal crib would ruin both the method and the poet.
Similar practices
Book divination is a separate family of methods that arose independently in different cultures: the Sortes Vergilianae using the Aeneid in Rome and medieval Europe, divination with the Bible, Japanese omikuji and the Chinese Kuan Yin oracle, where the ready-made texts are already numbered.
The underlying principle is the same: random access to a large body of expressive texts. The answer is created not by the book but by the reader, who looks for a connection between the text and their own situation — and that is exactly why the method works subjectively.