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

  One of the key verses summarizing Ḥāfiẓ’s erotic theology of inspired libertinism (rindī) is the following:

  Zāhid ar rāh bi rindī nabarad ma‘dhūr-ast /

  ‘Ishq kārī’st kay mawqūf-i hidāyat bāshad

  If the zealous puritan never found the way

  To penetrate into Romance’s universe, well,

  He’s forgiven – since Love’s a business that hinges

  On inculcation and tutelage.373

  By pairing rindī in the first hemistich with Love (‘ishq) in the second, the poet makes rindī homologous to love, while love, in turn, is affirmed to be the quintessence of rindī. Thus one may deduce that loverhood (‘āshiqī) and inspired libertinage (rindī) are identical in essence, a teaching that Ḥāfiẓ professes in a number of other verses as well.374 In Persian Sufi poetry of the qalandariyya genre, the pairing of lover (‘āshiq) and libertine (rind) is very common, as we can see in this verse by Shāh Ni‘matu’llāh:

  Since faith and creed of qalandars consists in taking lovers

  And libertines as examples, we too take qalandar ways.375

  Exactly the same juxtaposition of these terms appears throughout Kamāl Khujandī’s Dīvān as well, as in this verse:

  It’s clear as day that I’m a lover and a libertine;

  In paying homage to your visage, I am true as dawn.376

  This ubiquitous terminological cohabitation of loverhood and libertinism (rindī va ‘āshiqī) in Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān, and in the works of these two other major Sufi poets contemporary with him, reveals the rind to be a fedeli d’amore who adopts Eros and infatuation with Beauty-as-Beloved in all manifestations as his personal religious creed. Turning from Eternity towards the realm of space and time, this mystic lover, who is an extreme romantic, contemplates God’s appearances as the Beautiful (al-Jamīl) through His theophanic human form (shāhid), founding a cult of love upon the adoration of beauty.377 This is the meaning of so many of Ḥāfiẓ’s plaints, such as the following verse:

  Man Ādam-i bihishtī-am ammā darīn safar

  ḥālī asīr-i ‘ishq-i javānān-i mahvasham

  I am Adam come down from heaven

  Yet, here and now, in this journey, remain

  Bewitched – ensnared in love

  With youths with faces like the moon.378

  In Ḥāfiẓ’s erotic theology it is only through the romantic experience of becoming ensnared by earthly beauty through contemplation of the theophanic witness (shāhid) that the mystic paradoxically obtains release from the bonds of selfhood, which is why he says:

  I broadcast it out loud, and in this boast take delight:

  I am Love’s bondslave, free of earth and heaven both.

  I was an angel and the supreme paradise my sanctuary;

  It is man who brought me to this deserted cloister.379

  In the universe of Romance and the realm of rindī, liberation from the confines of mortality can only be obtained by the lover casting his glance (naẓar-bāzī) on the Sublime-in-mundane-disguise; that is, by practising the art of contemplation of the theophanic witness (shāhid-bāzī) whose presence gives him visual testimony of the existence of heavenly love and beauty. The Ishrāqī philosopher Muḥammad Dārābī, in his commentary on this verse, thus explains:

  How should Love’s bondslave – who is not fettered by any attachment, nor subject to any of the degrees of being, nor bound by the chain of existent beings either in this world and the Next and so is king over the realms of Appearance and Reality – not be delighted and find gratification in knowing that the entire cosmos is subject to Him? For his ‘slavery’ is the source of all liberty ... Being detached from everything, he is free, and from that standpoint he realizes that all the appearances in the world are but diverse manifestations of that Beauty, and thus he is also with everything...380

  ‘Inspired’ by being ‘enthralled’ to Love, the ‘libertine’ is thus paradoxically ‘free’ through being fettered by the bonds of romantic attachment. Shāh Ni‘matullāh provides a subtle summary of this romantic ‘theology of liberation’ through servitude to love preached by the inspired libertine in his essay on the Spiritual Degrees of the Inspired Libertines (Marātib-i rindān):

  In our creed the inspired libertine is subject to no veil whatsoever, whereas the hapless puritan ascetic (zāhid) is veiled by dint of his own abstinence and devotion ... Since the inspired libertine is not subject to anything, how should he be fettered by learning and books? ... The words of the inspired libertines [qawl-i rindān] reflect their cognizance of the fact that the entire world consists of God’s Beauty [jamāl Allāh], since ‘God is Beautiful and loves beauty’. Therefore, the lover who is fond of the world through the love he harbours for God, in reality loves God alone through God’s own love, for the beauty of the product in reality returns back to the Producer Himself. What a subtle matter!381

  The inspired libertine, like the qalandar, is thus detached from the world, whence his castigation of all those concerned with its affairs, whether sanctimonious pharisaical puritans or princes enthralled by the sceptre and crown of rule. It is in this spirit that Ḥāfiẓ preaches:

  Why should the inspired rogue who sets the world on fire

  Bother himself with wise counsel and advice? This world’s

  Labours it is that require reflection and deliberation.382

  Unconcerned with the material realm and all its labours (kār-i mulk), the kingdom of the inspired libertine/rogue/lover is not of this world, his soul not enmeshed in the political woes and economic weal of his day and age.383 This denigration of ‘wise counsel and advice’ (maṣlaḥāt-andīshī) by Ḥāfiẓ’s libertine in this verse was modelled on the following verse by Sa‘dī: ‘The reasoner [‘āqil] is a thinker and sere prudent deliberator over what’s wise. Come, profess the Religion of Love [madhhab-i ‘ishq], and free yourself from both thinking and deliberation.’384 The inspired libertine’s works are labours of love. He scorns the Sufi mantle (khirqa)385 and spurns the king’s crown386 as well as the cleric’s gown, resting his brow beside the drunkard’s head on the tavern stoop.387 He vaunts the beggar who glories in the kingdom of love and smashes the crown of worldly dominion.388 He takes louts for personal confidantes.389

  Ḥāfiẓ’s exploitation of plebeian vocabulary,390 which subverts the spiritual materialism of the exoteric religious and political authorities, is dictated by the higher standpoint of the secta amoris which he follows. The libertine–lover soon realizes that the dross of his being can only become refined in the alembic of blame (malāmat).391 This is because (as Maybudī put it): ‘Blame is the entire substance of the lover’s soul. All his assets lie in enduring the reproach of the vulgar [malāmat]. What sort of lover is he who cannot take blame?’392 Blame (malāmat) has a very positive effect on the spirit ‘because there is safety in derision’, as Yeats understood,393 for unless the spirit endures the blame of all and sundry it can never sever its ties with this lower realm and approach the beloved.394 Since blame focuses his attention away from himself towards divine Unity, malāmat becomes the first authentic spiritual degree of the inspired libertine/lover.

  At this juncture, having suffered reproach and abuse, the lover now becomes bereft of all avarice and desire for the world. The barbs of criticism hurled by friend and foe alike catapult him onto the higher stage of spiritual isolation (tajrīd) and denudation of self (tafrīd); from this standpoint, blame (malāmat), now appears paradoxically as a kind of grace which emanates the beloved’s zealous exclusiveness (ghayrat). ‘You should understand that he who is accepted by us is rejected by people and whosoever is accepted by people is rejected by us’, Hujwīrī states, explaining the thinking behind this erotic doctrine. ‘To incur blame [malāmat-i khalq] from the vulgar is therefore the very sustenance of God’s lovers. By receiving that blame, one finds proofs of God’s acceptance. This is, in fact, the mystical persuasion of the saints [mashrab-i awliyā’].’395 It is exactly in this vein that Ḥāfiẓ co
unsels that blame is an integral aspect of any affair of Amor:

  Whoever deserts your pathway because of blame

  Will never prosper whatsoever he does, and in

  The end expiates his error with endless shame.396

  Characterizing Ḥāfiẓ as a follower of the ‘path of blame’ (mashrab-i malāmatī) while interpreting this verse, Lāhūrī explains that because ‘the lover of God is always subject to blame from people, the affairs of any lover who pays heed to such blame will never prosper. Since he has already given his heart up to the beloved, to all others he must be indifferent.’397

  When the inspired libertine–lover succeeds in maintaining fidelity in Amor despite blame, at this level, his figurative human beloved (ma‘shūqa-i majāzī) becomes his ‘representative of supernatural beauty in the flesh [shāhid]’ with whom he cavorts (shāhid-bāzī). The lover’s playful engagement with the beloved (shāhid-bāzī) is thus the intermediate degree of rindī, generated from the stage of malāmat.398 At this stage, the lover becomes identified with the higher religion of ‘real infidelity’ (kufr-i ḥaqīqī), an integral part of the Religion of Love (madhhab-i ‘ishq) as well. In the Persian Sufi tradition the stock symbol of such successful endurance of blame in love is the legendary Shaykh Ṣan‘ān, who converted to Christianity on falling in love with a Christian girl, his theophanic witness. We should take San‘ān as a model of the perfect malāmatī lover, Ḥāfiẓ counsels:

  If you profess yourself a devotee of

  The highway of most noble Love

  Never give a second thought for name

  Or what men say is all ‘ill-fame’,

  Recall the cap and gown

  Of great Shaykh San‘ān –

  For months in hock, set in

  The wine-seller’s shop for pawn.399

  However, only when he is utterly detached from his ‘self’ does he reach the second degree of Romance – that is, of rindī – which is the level of ‘being a beloved’ (ma‘shūqī). It is from this level that the selfless discourse of the inspired libertines issue forth.400

  At the third and highest degree, the lover attains divine Unity. There, he discovers Absolute Love itself, becoming detached from all created being, freed from selfhood, indifferent both to both praise and blame, and even detached from the beloved her/himself. In sum, there are three spiritual levels through which the inspired libertine gradually ascends: ‘At the first stage of rindī is the degree of loverhood [‘āshiqī], transcending the created material realm. The second stage is that of being a beloved [ma‘shūqī], which transcends duality, and the third degree is that of Love [‘ishq] and divine Unity [tawḥīd].’401

  From this overview of the romantic vision of the inspired libertine, it is clear that from Ḥāfiẓ’s erotocentric perspective, rindī denotes the lover’s awareness of the ‘Fine Arts’ of Amor, which comprise his gnosis of the beloved/Beloved, his discernment of the aesthetics of erotic contemplation and the erotic gaze (shāhid-/naẓar-bāzī) on the physical plane, and finally his cognizance of Love’s metaphysics. Rindī is thus the mystic romantic’s personal conviction and creed during his progress and ascension towards the world of Absolute Love. This via purgativa and ascension of the lover into ‘the height of Love’s rare Universe’402 is an experience quite different from the rough encounter with the Mafioso thugs and hoodlums in the back-alleys of medieval Shīrāz by Sa‘dī’s dervish. Instead of being robbed of one’s material possessions by hoodlums in the material marketplace, the mystic rind undergoes a process of spiritual denudation, in which the landscape of his heart is cleared of all attachments and filled with God. For this reason, only the inspired libertine/rake (rind) who has endured blame, not the puritan ascetic who follows religious rites by rote, achieves salvation in love’s religion, as Ḥāfiẓ states:

  The ascetic had too much pride so could never soundly

  Traverse the Path. But the rake by way of humble entreaty

  And beggary at last went down to the House of Peace.403

  The term rind, it is useful to remember in this context, is derived from randa, the ‘carpenter’s plane’. In his commentary on Shabistarī’s Gulshan-i rāz (Garden of Mystery), Muḥammad Lāhījī (d. 912/1507), drawing on this etymology, describes the inspired libertine (rind) as ‘one who has cast away and shaved off all the forms of multiplicity and determined forms of being with the carpenter’s plane of self-obliteration and self-annihilation [randah-i maḥw va fanā’]...’.404 The habitation of the inspired libertine is the Tavern of Ruin (kharābāt), where he cannot be qualified by any spiritual or temporal description (awṣāf). He is free from the concrete properties (aḥkām) of being, having become emancipated from all ties of the world in all its confusing multiplicity.405 Echoing Lāhījī’s definitions, Lāhūrī likewise explains that:

  The rind according to the terminology of this noble company [the Sufis] signifies a person who has shaved off all the attachments of the realm of illusory multiplicity – whether these pertain to the Necessary or possible Being and their Divine Names, Attributes, pre-determined archetypal prototypes, characteristics and qualities along with all their various concrete aspects – with the carpenter’s plane [randa] of annihilation and obliteration [maḥw u fanā’] from the reality of his self. In this manner he has freed himself of everything. Thus he becomes the crown of the world and mankind. No other creature attains the summit of his exalted degree.406

  As we can see, in Ḥāfiẓ’s lexicon terms such as rind, zāhid, qalandar, and so forth, have meanings quite contrary to what they seem to literally represent. They are symbolic references encoded in poetic language to express the realm of experience of the heart’s initiates,407 reflecting both the mystical themes of romantic experience (rindī) on the Sufi via purgativa (with the plane of spiritual practice shaving clean the psyche of the impurities of material existence), which are in turn derived from the literary tradition of the malāmatiyya, qalandariyya and the ‘Religion of Love’ topos in classical Persian poetry.

  Notes

  1 Zarrīnkūb, Az kūcha-i rindān, p. xii. For an extended discussion of his date of birth, see ‘Alī Akbar Dihkhudā, ‘Ḥāfiẓ Shīrāzī’, Lughat-nāma, vol. 5, pp. 7490–1. Qazvīnī believed him to have been born in 715/1315 (see Mu‘īn, Ḥāfiẓ-i shīrīn-sukhan, I, p. 139).

  2 Limbert, Shīrāz in the Age of Hafez, pp. 108–18; Zarrīnkūb, Az kūcha-i rindān, pp. 9ff.

  3 A.J. Arberry, Shīrāz: Persian City of Saints and Poets.

  4 Ḥāfiẓ heaps scorn on these corrupt charitable endowments in one place in his Dīvān (ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 45: 4). Also, cf. Zarrīnkūb, Az kūcha-i rindān, p. 7, citing Qazwīnī’s Nuzhat al-qulūb, p. 138.

  5 As Zarrīnkūb observes: ‘Judging by what can be seen from his Dīvān, Ḥāfiẓ’s age was a time full of corruption and sin, hypocrisy and crime.’ Az kūcha-i rindān, p. 38.

  6 Ibid., p. 8.

  7 Sa‘dī, Kulliyāt-i Sa‘dī, Furūghī, p. 726; cited by Jahramī, ‘Mākhaz-i andīshahā-yi Sa‘dī: Rūzbihān Baqlī Shīrāzī’, p. 101.

  8 ‘Isā b. Junayd Shīrāzī, Tadhkira-yi Hazār-mazār.

  9 A good overview of these sites is given by Betteridge, ‘Ziārat: Pilgrimmage to the Shrines of Shīrāz’.

  10 Annemarie Schimmel, ‘The Ornament of the Saints’, p. 105.

  11 On the tombs of Shīrāz, see Betteridge, ‘Ziārat: Pilgrimmage to the Shrines of Shīrāz’.

  12 Cited by Arberry, Shīrāz: Persian City, p. 62.

  13 Zarrīnkūb, Justujū’ī dar taṣawwuf-i Irān, p. 226.

  14 Cited by Zarrīnkūb, Az kūcha-i rindān, p. 11.

  15 Cited by Arberry, Shīrāz: Persian City, p. 52.

  16 Cited by Zarrīnkūb, Az kūcha-i rindān, p. 10.

  17 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 274: 1, 4.

  18 Shahr-i ‘ishq, Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 261: 5.

  19 Zarrīnkūb, Az kūcha-i rindān, pp. 11, 22.

  20 ‘Ḥāfi�
��’s entire vision is dominated and overshadowed by love. It happens exactly the same way that, for example, a history of real events becomes attenuated during the time of romance when one falls in love. Love is always present there and visible, flowing through his vocabulary. Even when a certain historical event appears to have been clearly the occasion of a certain poem, the [romantic] inspiration animating it immediately dissipates and dissolves that history. For Ḥāfiẓ, love is the underlying cause of the world.’ Fouchécour, Hafiz de Chiraz, introduction, pp. 15–16.

  21 Schimmel, The Poet’s Geography, p. 9.

  22 Dīvān-i Khāqānī, vol. 2, p. 791 (ghazal 31, v. 4).

  23 Kulliyyāt-i Shams ya Dīvān-i kabīr, V, 2494/26367.

  24 Dīvān-i Kamāl al-Dīn Mas‘ūd Khujandī, ed. Dawlatābādī, introduction, p. 4. See also my ‘The Life and Times of Kamāl Khujandī’, pp. 164–5.

  25 Cited by Zarrīnkūb, Az kūcha-i rindān, p. 205, n. 1.

  26 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 329: 5–6, *.

  27 Ibid., ghazal 40: 8–9.

  28 Ṣafā, Tārīkh-i Adabiyāt-i Īrān, III, pp. 1072–3. For parallels between these poets and Ḥāfiẓ, see Khurramshāhī, Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, I, pp. 40–90.

  29 Zarrīnkūb, Az kūcha-i rindān, p. 64.

  30 See Mu‘īn, Ḥāfiẓ-i shīrīn-sukhan, I, pp. 306–13; Browne, Literary History of Persia, III, pp. 293–5. On Ḥāfiẓ’s praise of Amīn al-Dīn, see Arberry, Shīrāz: Persian City, p. 142; Ghanī, Baḥth dar, I, pp. 70–1, 124, 166–8. See also my essay in this volume, pp. 164–6.