The Poets Paved the Path to Peace

There’s a peculiar solace in turning to poets of yore when the world feels as though it is coming undone. In times of fracture, the verses of those long gone can often feel more urgent than our breaking news cycles, more enduring than the latest report or panel discussion.

Recently, I spent time with “The Idea of Peace in Great Poets of Persian Literature” by Mahmoud Mehravaran and Amirhossein Sadeghi. What I anticipated as a literary survey became, instead, an unexpected conversation about ethics, reconciliation, and the frailty of human nature, one I feel compelled to share.

Photo by Elnaz Asadi

The article undertakes a close reading of the works of five foundational figures in Persian literature: Ferdowsi, Rumi, Sa’di, Hafez, and Iqbal Lahori. Though separated by centuries, geography, and varying historical contexts, each of these poets wrote persistently about peace, not merely as the absence of war but as a mode of being, a conscious ethic of empathy, tolerance, and justice.

Mehravaran and Sadeghi carefully map out how these poets diagnose the ailments that lead societies toward violence: resentment, jealousy, arrogance, intolerance, unchecked authoritarianism, and the often unexamined love of nation that can curdle into chauvinism.

The Poetic Diagnosis of Conflict

“Why is peace being threatened?” the authors ask plainly in their introduction. “What are the backgrounds for lack of peace? What are the likely solutions for the present situation?” These, they argue, are not new questions born of modern geopolitics or international law.

They are ancient preoccupations, as old as language itself, voiced by poets who understood that peace was never merely the absence of war, but a state of moral, emotional, and communal equilibrium. It is a condition of the soul and of the polis, a way of holding one another gently in a world forever prone to fracture.

The article is methodical in its approach, outlining what it calls the “opposing elements to peace,” a taxonomy of human failings that reads with unsettling familiarity. Among them: resentment, jealousy, intolerance, difference of opinion, authoritarianism, and what the authors call “extreme patriotism.” The last feels painfully, almost prophetically relevant in our age of revived ethno-nationalisms and territorial chauvinism. These poets saw in their own times how devotion to homeland, untethered from human kinship and ethical responsibility, could curdle into exclusion, war, and the denial of others' humanity.

Ferdowsi, whose Shahnameh is so often remembered for its sweeping battles and heroic narratives, tempers his epics with calls for restraint and moral clarity. In one striking passage, he urges: Do not nurture the seed of malicious hatred. Do not torment your body and psyche; eschew bloodshed.” The wisdom here lies in its recognition of hatred’s corrosive effects not only on societies but on the individual soul. Violence begins, these poets seem to argue, not on the battlefield but in the quiet recesses of the heart, where grudges fester and envy blooms.

Rumi, the poet-mystic, takes this further, warning of the insidiousness of unchecked resentment: “Avoid grudge; those who hold grudge, their graves are dig next to the haters. The source of hatred is hell and your hatred is part of the whole.” For Rumi, hatred is not merely an individual failing but a cosmic disorder, a fragment of a greater darkness. His prescription is not tolerance in the condescending, liberal sense of quietly enduring difference, but a radical, intimate acceptance of human plurality as essential to spiritual growth. “If you tolerate the opposite, you find a place in his heart,” he writes. In an age of ideological tribalism, of terminal certainties and cultural silos, this ethic of humility feels impossibly urgent.

Even Hafez, with his famously skeptical tone, chimes in on the fracturing power of moral arrogance. He laments the divisions of sect and creed, remarking,“The war (division) of the seventy-two nations is justifiable, because they did not see the truth and made up a myth.” It is a withering critique of how humans splinter themselves over partial and mistaken conceptions of the sacred, elevating doctrine above decency, and opinion above love and community.

What Mehravaran and Sadeghi demonstrate throughout the article is that conflict, for these poets, is rarely inevitable. But it is not unpredictable. Conflict is cultivated, by wounded egos, rigid dogmas, insecure rulers, and unexamined loyalties. But it can be dismantled, if not through grand treaties and decrees, then by the quiet, persistent practice of kindness, humility, and the willingness to see oneself in the other.

Peace as Praxis

The poets did not stop at diagnosing the roots of violence. They offered practices for cultivating peace. As the authors note, these include kindness, benevolence, courteous speech, and above all, public consent. In this sense, peace becomes not a destination but a discipline, a habit of both private character and public governance.

Sa’di, always the pragmatist, warns rulers, “Try your best to not break the heart of people, otherwise you uproot yourself.” It is a deceptively simple line that carries the weight of political philosophy. Sa’di understood what so many regimes, both ancient and contemporary, have forgotten. That legitimacy is not imposed through might, but grows from the soil of public trust and consent. This recognition, that authority depends not on the machinery of power but on the contentment of the governed, feels like a startlingly modern cry that we should be reasserting today. Loudly, and often.

Hafez, ever the lyrical dissenter, pairs this with the simplest of prescriptions, “Plant the tree of friendship that yields happiness of heart. Uproot the tree of enmity since it causes innumerable sufferings.” Yet simplicity too is a form of wisdom. The article reminds us that Hafez’s poetry is never mere ornament, never escapist romanticism. It is social commentary disguised as love poetry, a rebuke of hypocrisy and a defense of love as a moral and political imperative. His verses remind us that reconciliation is not sentimental, it is strategy.

The article is particularly strong when it addresses legitimate defense. Neither Ferdowsi nor Sa’di advocates pacifism in the face of tyranny. Ferdowsi, in Shahnameh, makes clear that when dignity, land, and the safety of one’s people are endangered, resistance becomes a moral duty: “If someone intends to go to war with you and doesn’t withdraw his grudge, you are allowed to shed blood everywhere.” This sentiment echoes what just war theorists like Augustine and Aquinas would later codify: that while violence is a moral tragedy, it can be permissible, even necessary, when it serves to protect human dignity and repel unjust aggression.

Yet even when identifying justifications for self-defense or just war theory, our Persian poets largely favor forbearance and reconciliation. Sa’di, who spent much of his life navigating the courts of rulers and witnessing the cycles of tyranny firsthand, pleads for wisdom over retaliation: “When a problem can be solved through wisdom and prudence, forbearance with the enemy is more prudent. Do not tie your eyebrows as much as you can, because the enemy, though weak, is better to be turned to friend.” It is a call not for passivity, but for moral discernment, to know when to hold one’s ground and when to extend a hand.

As such, these poets advocate for a peace forged in dignity, justice, and accountability, not in capitulation or hollow performance. Peace, in their telling, is neither utopian nor naïve. It is a difficult, often lonely labor that demands courage, patience, and a disciplined refusal to mirror the violence one resists.

Peace as Interdependence

What stays with me most after reading this article is the way these poets conceive of peace as relational, not transactional. It is not a mere ceasefire or a negotiated truce. Peace is a state of mutual recognition, an ethic of care, and a sustained awareness of the inextricable ties that bind us.

Sa’di’s immortal couplet, quoted by the authors, encapsulates the entire worldview, “Human beings are members of a whole, in creation of one essence and soul. If one member is affected with pain, other members uneasy will remain.” This is not naïve humanism. It is a political philosophy rooted in interdependence, in the belief that no individual or community can secure lasting peace while others suffer.

It aligns closely with contemporary relational theories of peace, particularly those articulated by scholars like Elise Boulding and John Paul Lederach, who argue that peace is not a static state to be achieved but a dynamic, evolving web of relationships to be tended, repaired, and sustained. In this sense, peace is not something we possess; it is something we practice together.

Even Iqbal Lahori, writing in the charged political atmosphere of the early 20th century and in the shadow of colonial fragmentation, warns against the atomization of humanity into warring factions, “They divided the human race into tribes. Humaneness disappeared from the Earth, people became strangers to people.” It is a line that cuts sharply against the contemporary resurgence of nationalism, sectarianism, and exclusivist identity politics. Iqbal calls instead for a solidarity of conscience, one that transcends bloodlines and borders and refuses to reduce human dignity by the accident of birth or allegiance.

What is particularly striking is how these poets resist the language of tolerance-as-condescension. They do not ask us to merely endure difference, but to recognize in it the mirror of our own incompleteness. As Rumi so beautifully suggests in his famous allegory of the elephant in the dark, “Their points of view created various speeches, one called it A, the other B. If each of them had a candle, their difference would have stopped.” If each of us carries only a fragment of the truth, then wisdom, and peace, require that we listen, not to confirm our certainties, but to expand them.

The vision offered by these poets, and illuminated by Mehravaran and Sadeghi, is of peace as both a social contract and a metaphysical principle. It begins in the self, extends to the neighbor, and radiates outward to the polis. It is cultivated in speech, in tenderness, in the quiet decision to let go of old resentments, and in the political will to dismantle the structures that feed them. It is, above all, a recognition that to injure another is, quite literally, to injure oneself.

Why It Matters Now

Mehravaran and Sadeghi’s article feels timely not because it uncovers something new, but because it reminds us of what we already know and too often forget. That peace is a practice. That tolerance is a choice. That justice is the soil from which peace must grow. The authors write, “The wise and thoughtful have long advised living in peace, and avoiding violence and war.”

It’s a simple truth, but simplicity, as these poets knew, is not the same as ease.

What strikes me most is how these poets understood that the roots of violence are intimate, as much personal as they are political. They saw how resentment festers in the heart before it spills into the streets, how intolerance takes hold at the level of speech long before it becomes policy. Their verses insist that peace is forged first in our homes, our conversations, our small acts of mercy, and only then in the grand designs of states and empires.

I left this article feeling as though I had been granted both a history lesson and a charge. Literature is not passive ornament. It never has been. It is memory, ethic, and oracle. These poets did not merely describe their world. They sought to remake it, one verse, one act of kindness, one forsworn grudge at a time. They understood, in ways we are still struggling to articulate, that peace cannot exist in the abstract. It must be spoken aloud, practiced, defended, and passed on.

Perhaps our task is the same. To remember. To recite. To rebuild. To become, in whatever small ways we can manage, the kind of people from whom peace might one day grow.

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Originally posted here: https://maryamsmosaic.substack.com/p/the-poets-paved-the-path-to-peace.