Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Read online

  As an institution, the qalandariyya was closely connected with the early malāmatī tradition in tenth-/eleventh-century Nishapur in Khurāsān,295 which later, under the leadership of Jamāl al-Dīn Sāwī (d. circa 630/1232), developed into separate orders with their own Khānaqāhs scattered all over Egypt, Libya, Turkey, Persia and India.296 Historically speaking, the qalandariyya movement represented a sort of mass institutionalization of the high principles of the malāmatī moral philosophy. In Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry the qalandar libertine (rind-i qalandar) stands at the summit of the spiritual hierarchy. The qalandar is the supreme mystical monarch before whom even the prince must bend his knee to receive his crown:

  Around the tavern door

  The reprobates of God – qalandars – swarm

  They withdraw and they bestow

  The diadems of Empire.297

  In this verse, Ḥāfiẓ’s libertine wildmen (rindān-i qalandar) appear as ‘opportunists’ in the mystical realm. The term ‘opportunist’ is etymologically derived from the Latin porta (an entrance or passage through), an opportunus being that which offers an opening, or stands before an opening. Thus, for the Romans a porta fenestella was an opening through which Fortune could enter.298 The wildman-libertine (rind-i qalandar) in this verse stands at the door of drunkenness, the same door, the same opportunus through which diadems, crowns and thrones have all issued forth, and through which they will pass away. Like Ahasureus, the mysterious Wandering Jew in Shelley’s epic poem Hellas,299 Ḥāfiẓ’s rind is transported in ecstasy beyond time, space and place, gaining control by relinquishing control, acquiring power through detachment.300 This spiritual ideal of detachment, represented by the inspired libertine and the qalandar, is praised by Ḥāfiẓ in another celebrated verse:

  I serve the will and esprit of that One

  Who commits to flames his own security,

  Who wears the rags of beggary, yet knows the lore of alchemy.

  A thousand enigmas subtler, finer spun than

  A strand of hair lie here. – Not everyone

  Who shaves his scalp can understand the qalandar.301

  Throughout his ghazals (where two references to the qalandarī rite302 and four to the qalandar himself303 appear), Ḥāfiẓ flagrantly flaunts his fondness for this holy vagabond’s anti-materialistic ideals.304

  The poet also drew heavily on malāmatī doctrines,305 at least ten of which he espoused, as Khurramshāhī has demonstrated in extenso. A summary of these doctrines is as follows:

  • Submitting oneself to public censure and blame, while not fearing – indeed, not being offended at – the accusations and slander of religious fundamentalists.

  • Renunciation of ambition for worldly rank, status, accompanied by indifference to being known for personal probity and goodness. Being reckless vis-à-vis political conciliations conventionally made to protect one’s reputation, along with disregard for fame and name.

  • Avoidance of any ostentatious display of ascetical piety and sanctimony, evading all public self-promotion of personal religiosity.

  • Renunciation of hypocrisy (in order to cut off the root of hypocrisy, he even severely castigates himself to the point of calling himself a hypocrite so as to better censure hypocrisy).

  • Having a critical outlook on all conventional social institutions: religious, academic, governmental, mystical (e.g. mosque, madrasa and khānaqāh).

  • Renunciation of all claim to charismatic powers and visionary experiences.

  • Concealing the shortcomings and covering up the faults and foibles of others.

  • Repudiation of conceit, amour propre, egotism and self-satisfaction in the struggle against and mortification of the lower soul (nafs).

  • Affecting shamelessness, feigning impiety, irreligiosity, perversity and blasphemy. The best example of this is Bāyazid’s breaking of his fast during the day in public, although he was travelling, and hence by Canon Law was permitted to do this – so people would imagine him to be impious.

  • Salvation through love.306

  Although malāmatī conceptions are generally alien to Western philosophical ethics, in certain Gospel sayings such as ‘Blessed are ye when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil...’, a quasi-malāmatī sentiment – that one must live above the world and consider all worldy employments as things not to be desired but only endured and suffered, with the censure of the vulgar considered as an inevitable trial to be endured on the via purgativa – is proclaimed.307 The anti-social attitudes, and the licence of affected shamelessness in Sufi Malāmatī teachings, have also often been compared to the school of Greek Cynics, Diogenes of Sinope’s teachings in particular. However, malāmatī ethics are in this respect far more akin to the moral philosophy of Roman Stoicism. Seneca’s saying, Malis displicere laudari est (‘To displease the wicked is to be praised’), for instance, which distinguishes between the ignominy of a ‘glory’ that depends on the judgement of the illiterate masses and true ‘renown’ whose acclaim derives from the judgement of wise men, professes a Sufi sort of indifference to name and fame that expresses the malāmatī ethic perfectly. Paraphrased by Ben Jonson as ‘To be dispraised is the most perfect praise’,308 Milton set Seneca’s saying to verse in his Paradise Regained:

  For what is glory but the blaze of fame,

  The people’s praise, if always praise unmixed?

  And what the people but a herd confused,

  A miscellaneous rabble, who extol

  Things vulgar and well weighed, scarce worth the praise,

  They praise and they admire they know not what;

  And know not whom, but as one leads the other;

  And what delight to be by such extolled,

  To live upon their tongues and be their talk,

  Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise?309

  Following the English school of Radical Religious Dissent, William Blake, in stating in his Proverbs of Hell, ‘Listen to the fool’s reproach! It is a kingly title!’ – seems to have been imparting a kind of malāmatī instruction – perhaps echoing Milton’s views here.310

  Sufis of all orders professed malāmatī doctrines in common. The dangers of hypocrisy, pride, unctuous self-righteousness and being wise in one’s own conceit are constant themes in classical Sufi manuals.311 The merging of malāmatī ethical doctrine into the repertoire of the Persian Sufi poetry is evidenced by the fact that figures such as the inspired libertine (rind), vagabond (qalandar) and brigand (‘ayyār) all originally possessed negative social values, but reappeared with positive connotations accorded them by the Sufi poets. In the same spirit the Sufi poets celebrated infidelity and heresy, and extolled Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Christianity as symbols for higher, esoteric modes of faith.312 Ḥāfiẓ’s malāmatī ethic is entirely based on this logopoetic Sufi symbolic language; his self-inculpation and penchant for incurring the blame and censure of the vulgar have, it must be stressed, supra-aesthetic and meta-literary significance. Rather than mere colourful metaphors limned with delightful erotic images, there are precise spiritual significances in verses such as these:

  People have aimed the arrow of guilt a hundred times

  In our direction. With the help of our Darling’s eyebrow,

  Blame has been a blessing, and has opened all our work.313

  As a purificatory experience, the self-abasement generated by being reviled publically turns the malāmatī unitarian away from creature to Creator, from the vulgar mob towards God. Blame thus strengthens faith, being much more efficacious than praise in directing the mystic’s attention to the Supreme Cause and away from secondary causes. The mystical theology of the malāmatī doctrines in this verse can be traced back to a verse of the Qur’ān praising those whose love of God is so sincere that ‘they do not fear to be censured by anyone who might censure them’ (V: 54). ‘To become an object of contempt and blame is marvellously efficacious in achieving
sincerity in love’, the early theoretician of Persian Sufism ‘Alī Hujwīrī thus explained in his chapter on the Malāmatī School in the Kashf al-maḥjūb. ‘The people of God have always been distinguished by being the butt of blame and censure of common people.’314

  To put the above verse in its proper context now: by means of becoming a target of public vituperation (malāmat), the lover is blessed with the experience of an opening, the eyebrow here serving as a ‘symbol par excellence to communicate Divine expressions and intimations, directing the wayfarer’s attention towards Unity, just as the arching of the human beloved’s eyebrow directs the lover’s attention to his or her eye, face, and expressions.’315

  In the same vein, one of the important principles of both profane love theory and the malāmatī theology of love is that the lover is always reviled and discredited.316 A fundamental axiom of the Art of Amor in the Sufi tradition is that no romantic affair, human or divine, worldly or otherworldly, temporal or spiritual, is ever safe from public blame and slander.317 In one verse, Ḥāfiẓ thus contrasts the dangers of a lover’s intoxication to the ‘security and safety’ (salāmat) of the conventional life of the non-lover:

  In a nook safe from blame, how can we stay

  Secluded when your dark eye reminds us

  Always of the joy and mysteries of drunkenness?318

  The lover’s life is dangerous, the lover being by definition one who eschews what’s safe and sound, for:

  Although consorting with what’s safe and sound

  Seems, dear heart, to be a joy and a delight,

  Love too has much grace and chic and charm,

  And her side too must not be forsworn.319

  The deliberate concealment of one’s virtues and good deeds, and exposure of one’s vice and faults – the invition of condemnation from the common herd by the malāmatī – is one of Ḥāfiẓ’s perennial themes, as these two verses attest:

  Don’t expect obedience, promise-keeping, or rectitude

  From me; I’m drunk. I’ve been famous for carrying

  A wine pitcher around since the First Covenant with Adam.320

  * * *

  The name of Ḥāfiẓ has been well inscribed in the books,

  But in our clan of disreputables, the difference

  Between profit and loss is not all that great.321

  Ḥāfiẓ’s most famous poem in which he flaunts his bacchanalian ethics and erotic spirituality in the face of formalist Muslim clerics while celebrating the mystical theology of the Path of Blame, begins with these three key verses:

  I’m well known throughout the whole city

  For being a wild-haired lover; and I’m that man who has

  Never darkened his vision by seeing evil.

  Through my enthusiasm for wine, I have thrown the book

  Of my good name into the water; but doing that insures that

  The handwriting in my book of grandiosity will be blurred.

  Let’s be faithful to what we love; let’s accept reproach

  And keep our spirits high, because on our road, being easily

  Hurt by the words of others is a form of infidelity.322

  Hujwīrī’s exegesis of malāmatī philosophy in his Kashf al-maḥjūb illuminates the theosophical teachings and meaning underlying Hāfiẓ’s verses quite well:

  It has been decreed by God that whoever discourses about Him, He makes the butt of the world’s abuse. Simultaneously, He preserves their consciousness from being preoccupied by that blame. This is a result of divine jealousy – for thus God protects His friends from paying attention to anyone save Him lest the non-initiates catch a glimpse of the beauty of their spiritual state. It also protects those devotees from self-regard and the hubris of self-consciousness. Hence, they don’t become puffed up about themselves and succumb to self-righteous conceit [‘ujb] and arrogance. Therefore, God has set the common herd over them to tongue-lash and blame them ... so that no matter what they do, they suffer blame and abuse ... For it is a fundamental axiom in the Way of God that there is no affliction or veil on the Way tougher than being wise in one’s own conceit [‘ujb].323

  Ḥāfiẓ’s defence of the erotics of the heart and the eye (the philosophy of shāhid-bāzī, discussed below, here.) against medieval Islamic Puritanism is manifest in the first verse above.

  In the second verse, devoted to Sufi bacchanalian doctrine, Ḥāfiẓ basks in his succès de scandale at being blamed as a drinker of wine, in ruining his reputation – that ‘good name’ which is more culpable than any sin since it leads to self-righteous conceit (‘ujb, as Hujwīrī observed). Whereas ascetic abstinence and religious piety often culminate in self-righteousness, the adoration of wine ‘dissolves all the effects and traces of egocentric self-worship from the mystic’s being. This verse thus exemplifies the poet’s malāmatī tastes and disgust with the false reputation which ensue from fame and name and receiving public honours from people.’324

  Lastly, in the third verse, the term malāmat is then explicitly invoked by the poet as he elucidates the metaphysical reason why the sage never feels aggrieved at the disapprobation and censure of the common horde of men.325

  From this hasty overview of Ḥāfiẓ’s views on the Sufi Path of Blame (which comprise but a tiny portion of these expressions), it is apparent how profoundly his radical spiritual nonconformism is indebted to the early malāmatī Sufi teachings.326 As we can see, the ethic of the inspired libertine (rind) in his detachment from self and society, self-denigration and self-inculpation, anti-materialism and warm-hearted generosity, all have precise antecedents in Sufi malāmatī teachings. Ḥāfiẓ’s imagery of the figure connected with the inspired libertine, who represents the highest degree of the lover, who repudiates the trammels of the ethical absolutes of conventional Sharī‘a-oriented piety, who engages in the sport of gazing on beauty (naẓar-bāz) and is a lover of beautiful women/boys (shāhid-bāz), who drinks the dregs of love-passion (durdī-yi dard), who cares naught for fair name, ill-fame or shame (nām u nang), recking neither praise or blame, and who disdains preachers of ascetical piety (zuhd u zāhid), can be found exactly mirrored in verse after verse by Sanā’ī, ‘Aṭṭār and Sa‘dī in those ghazals that belong to the literary genre of the qalandariyya which they composed.327 As revealed above, the qalandarī imagery in medieval Persian Sufi poetry and the qalandar himself reflect malāmatī conceptions. With Ḥāfiẓ’s highlighting of the romantic ideals of rind and rindī within this stock qalandarī poetic lexicon, a kind of semantic transformation took place, as Khurramshāhī observes:

  In accordance with his malāmatī perspective, Ḥāfiẓ came to view both the acceptable or ‘good’ characters and positions of society and the rejected or ‘bad’ figures and circumstances of society with a highly critical eye, subjecting them both to the harshest re-evaluation. Following the precedent set by Sanā’ī and ‘Aṭṭār in this respect, he took the character of the inspired libertine (rind), which occupied a lowly, dishonourable social rank in the echelons and ranks of contemporary society, out from under the stairs, adopting it to be his own particular persuasion and rite of faith. From the antecedent mystical tradition Ḥāfiẓ took the theosophical outlook on the ‘Perfect Man’ [insān-i kāmil] or ‘True Man’, and with his own creative genius and mythological imagination attached this concept to the notion of the distracted and footloose rind, calling the thirsty rind a saint [walī].328

  And in this fashion, the inspired libertine in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry became elevated to one of the most exalted spiritual ranks in his religion of love (madhhab-i ‘ishq),329 as will be seen from the ensuing discussion.

  The Art of Erotic Contemplation (shāhid-bāzī)

  Lift up the tulip-cup: its eyes’ drunken narcissus gaze,

  And set on me the label ‘pervert’. With so many judges

  That are set over me, O Lord, who should I take to be my judge?330

  – Ḥāfiẓ

  From the foregoing study, we see that the term rin
d in its simple outer, literal sense has two main connotations: (1) a clever, cunning and crafty person – an ‘artful dodger’ in Dickens’ sense, or a ‘rogue’ in the Shakespearean sense; and (2) a person with a reckless, nonconformist, devil-may-care attitude unrestrained by any ties of conventional social morality.331 However, the interior symbolic significance of the term, properly qualifying this rogue or libertine with the adjective ‘inspired’, is only revealed once we examine the metaphysical, erotic and ethical bases of the term.

  The inspired libertine’s antinomian ethic, or rindī, is described by Ḥāfiẓ as a kind of ‘art’/‘virtue’ (hunar). The erotic ethic of rindī involves two contemplative disciplines practised by the fedeli d’amore, respectively called shāhid-bāzī and naẓar-bāzī.

  The term shāhid means both ‘seer’ and ‘witness’, and as a technical term in Sufism, shāhid-bāzī (cavorting with she/he who is a Witness) is the art of contemplation of the divine in the mundane-human, beholding the divine in the mirror of human beauty, the latter bearing ‘witness’ to the former, the shāhid thus becoming an ‘icon of beauty’ or ‘divine demonstration’, one who bears ‘witness’ to the presence of divine. In this sense, shāhid-bāzī means ‘sporting with beauty’s icon’ or ‘cavorting with mortal forms of beauty that are demonstrative of divinity’. In the words of Henry Corbin: ‘The shāhid denotes the being whose beauty bears witness to the divine beauty, by being the divine revelation itself, the theophany par excellence. As the place and form of the theophany, he bears witness to this beauty of the divine Subject Himself; because he is present to the divine Subject as His witness, it means that God is contemplating Himself in him, is contemplating the evidence of Himself.’332