From the conclusion to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Case of Identity:
“And Miss Sutherland?”
“If I tell her she will not believe me. You may remember the old Persian saying, ‘There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.’ There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.”
I tried tracing the exact citation for this line but could find nothing online. The footnote in the New Annotated Sherlock Holmes surrenders as well:
“Hafiz” is also spelled “Hafez.” His more complete name is Mohammed Shams Od-Dīān Haāfez (b. 1325/26, Shīāraāz, Iran–d. 1389/90, Shīāraāz), and he was one of the finest lyric poets of Persia. The Diwan (Collected Poems) of the poet was not translated in its entirety into English prose until 1891. However, scholars have been unable to trace the proverb to any published works of Hafiz.
“Horace” is Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 B.C.), the greatest of the Latin lyric poets.
This was still unsatisfying so I went digging further and found what at first appeared a real suggestion in a book by John Yohannan called Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200 Year History
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put into the mouth of his famous sleuth Sherlock Holmes the observation that “there is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace and as much knowledge of the world,” he was probably chiefly inspired by the advantage of alliteration in the poets’ names. the sentiment he attributed to Hafiz in “A Case of Identity” … was more likely an adaptation of the fifty-third Maxim in Sadi’s Gulistan in Eastwick’s translation.
That passage in the translation referenced reads:
Maxim LIII
To consult with women is ruin, and to be liberal to the mischievous is a crime.
Couplet
To sharp-toothed tigers kind to be
To harmless flocks is tyranny.
Aside from the convenient collocation of women and tigers, I don’t find the proposed source at all convincing.
Overall I’m rather inclined to lean on this being an invented source, inspired only by Conan Doyle’s taste for giving Holmes occasional outbursts hinting at deep knowledge in out-of-the-way fields – something like the intellectual equivalent of his eccentricity in keeping ‘his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper’ (per The Musgrave Ritual).
Extracts 
I agree totally, but stop killing the illusion haha.
LikeLike
Of course I would end up here for the best examination of the problem. The ACD Encyclopedia (online) quotes a fragment from ACD’s MYSTERY OF CLOOMBER (1888) naming John Hunter West (the protagonist’s father) as the first Orientalist after Sir William Jones to celebrate Hafiz. It is certainly this (fictional) scholar who created the version of the proverb quoted by Holmes. A digital search through Alger (1856) and Emerson’s GULISTAN (the obvious sources on our own side of the pond) yields no tiger references appropriate to Sherlock’s framing, and I hesitate to dive into thirteen volumes of Jones (the obvious remaining place). But I suppose that was where earlier Holmesians started. Stern (“SH: Book Collector”) is, as usual, of little real help. Melville is so much easier . . .
LikeLike
I like this line of approach for pointing to a personal pattern of invention – one clearly fictional engagement with Hafiz certainly makes me feel more confident letting go of the Holmes proverb as equally invented.
I never added anything to this post – it’s more fun to investigate than have to write it up – but I did pick at this wound once more a while back. I dropped Hafiz as a dead end and focused on the tiger. There’s an amusing story about tactics for stealing tiger cubs that originates in Pliny and then passes with a few tweaks to the medieval bestiaries (overview here – https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/britannia/anglo-saxon/flowers/tiger.html and passages here – https://bestiary.ca/beasts/beastsource131.htm). The Aberdeen Bestiary tells it as:
The tiger is named for its swiftness in flight; the Persians and Greeks call it ‘arrow’. It is a beast distinguished by its varied markings, its courage and its extraordinary speed. The Tygris takes its name from the tiger, because it is the fastest-flowing of all rivers. is their main home. The tigress, when she finds her lair empty by the theft of a cub, follows the tracks of the thief at once. When the thief sees that, even though he rides a swift horse, he is outrun by her speed, and that there is no means of escape at hand, he devises the following deception. When he sees the tigress drawing close, he throws down a glass sphere. The tigress is deceived by her own image in the glass and thinks it is her stolen cub. She abandons the chase, eager to gather up her young. Delayed by the illusion, she tries once again with all her might to overtake the rider and, urged on by her anger, quickly threatens the fleeing man. Again he holds up her pursuit by throwing down a sphere. The memory of the trick does not banish the mother’s devotion. She turns over the empty likeness and settles down as if she were about to suckle her cub. And thus, trapped by the intensity of her sense of duty, she loses both her revenge and her child.
We get here mention of Persians and tigers and of the danger of taking tiger cubs. The mirroring sphere thrown before the pursuing tiger mother is a means of removing danger by creating delusion.
I could never manage to sell myself on Conan Doyle reworking all this into a pseudo-proverb (especially his having to transpose creating delusion to avoid danger into creating danger by snatching away delusion) but maybe it was lurking somewhere in the background of his imagination.
LikeLike