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

  237 Ghanī, in Baḥth, I, pp. 403–6, lists and discusses four other ghazals composed for Shāh Manṣūr, as well as several verses found in later manuscripts of his Sāqī-nāma which praise the prince. In a very late manuscript of one of Ḥāfiẓ’s key erotic ghazals (Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 338; cf. Ghanī’s discussion, Baḥth, I, pp. 415–16 of the line), mention of Shāh Manṣūr also appears in one line (Man ghulām-i Shāh Manṣūram...); there also exists another panegryical ghazal (not in Khānlarī’s edition) in praise of the ruler; mentioned by Ghanī, Baḥth, I, pp. 414–16, found in Dīwān-i Khwāja Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Qazvīnī and Ghanī, no. 329, pp. 224–6.

  238 Ghanī, Baḥth, I, pp. 406–8.

  239 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 149: 12. Isti‘lāmī (Dars-i Ḥāfiẓ, I, pp. 439–42), sees the ghazal as primarily devoted to love, and only panegyrical in its last four verses, but Fouchécour (Hafiz de Chiraz: Le Divān, p. 456) describes it as a wholly panegyrical poem: ‘celui d’un courtisan dont l’expression court entièrement sur le register de l’amour’.

  240 Manz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane, p. 72.

  241 Ghanī, Baḥth, I, pp. 425–32.

  242 Ibid., I, pp. 436–8.

  243 Ibid., I, p. 101. See also Zarrīnkūb’s (Az kūcha-i rindān, pp. 82–3) discussion of Ḥāfiẓ’s small number of his panegyrical poems and his use of the indirect erotic language of the ghazal.

  244 Discussing Ḥāfiẓ’s panegyrical poems, Khurramshāhī (Dhihn va zabān-i Ḥāfiẓ, 3rd edn, p. 420) observes: ‘Since Ḥāfiẓ’s mind was mainly preoccupied by erotic lyricism and “the erotic” comprises the most accessible aspect and common theme of his discourse, we need therefore to remember that he did not regard the “Object of praise” himself [mamdūḥ] very highly when he wrote in the panegyric genre, for he saw no need to act in a manner contrary to his own natural inclinations.’

  245 As Fouchécour (Hafiz de Chiraz, introduction, p. 15) stresses, ‘in Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān the literal meaning is always subordinate to the metaphorical one. Metaphor is the realm in which the poet develops his thought.’

  246 The main problem in using the Dīvān for sourcing biographical details is that such an approach often leads to deliberate neglect of theological, mystical, ethical and homiletic dimensions in those verses themselves, the dicta of which are moreover exempla not to be taken literally. Thus, Zarrīnkūb was honest enough to concede that his own historically oriented approach has serious drawbacks since: ‘in some cases the expression of the poet appears to be so vague and arcane that one cannot ever interpret its meaning in a literal sense. It is true that there are a few verses that directly allude to the poet’s patron and object of praise [mamdūḥ] whom he celebrates with the qualities of a beloved [ma‘shūq] – and how many of his beloveds are in fact just a king or vizier! – but in many places his language is extremely vague and deceptively multifaceted [rindāna], because of which one cannot interpret his words ... in which simple references to historical circumstances are situated cheek by jowl with the most complex theosophical and mystical mysteries ... to mean simply what they literally profess.’ Az kūcha-i rindān, p. xiv.

  247 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 150: 5.

  248 Ibid., ghazal 292: 2. In this context, Ḥāfiẓ’s disdain of worldliness belongs squarely to the contempti mundi or zuhdiyya genre of the Sufi theoerotic lyric (ghazal) and has absolutely nothing to do with an espousal of ‘the doctrine of unreason’ or ‘intellectual nihilism’ (!) as Arberry weirdly speculated (Fifty Poems of Ḥāfiẓ, introduction, pp. 29, 31). On this genre (dhamm al-dunyā) in Sufism, see Ritter, Ocean, chap. 2 (‘The World’); in Ḥāfiẓ (cf. the term istighnā), see Mu‘īn, Ḥāfiẓ-i shīrīn-sukhan, I, pp. 473–4. Cf. John Donne: ‘What fragmentary rubbidge this world is / Thou knowest, and that it is not worth a thought; / He honours it too much that thinkes it nought’ (‘The Second Anniversary’, pp. 82–4).

  249 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 163: 10.

  250 Ibid., ghazal 110: 4.

  251 Ibid., ghazal 40: 10.

  252 Ibid., ghazal 355: 9.

  253 R.W. Emerson, Journals, 1847; quoted in Works, VIII, p. 417. I am grateful to Farhang Jahanpour for providing this reference in his ‘Hafiz and Ralph Waldo Emerson’ (unpublished typescript), p. 6.

  254 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 324: 3.

  255 Ibid., ghazal 324: 11.

  256 Ibid., ghazal 35: 4; see Isti‘lamī’s refutation of the interpretation of this poem as a panegyric: Dars-i Ḥāfiẓ, I, p. 159 (ghazal 34).

  257 Muḥammad Isti‘lāmī, Dars-i Ḥāfiẓ, I, pp. 53–4.

  258 Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Kwasny (ed.), Toward the Open Field, p. 56.

  259 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 264: 7. Also cf. ghazal 477: 4.

  260 Mentioned more than 80 times in the Dīvān, ‘perhaps no other word in the entire Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ is more difficult to define’, observed Khurramshāhī, ‘and yet by far the most significant and constructive thesis advanced by Ḥāfiẓ lies embedded within the term rind’ (Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, I, p. 403). Likewise, Pūrjavādī reflects: ‘The primordial postern into the universe of Ḥāfiẓ’s thought is rindī, which is the veritable key to the door of the philosophy of Persian spirituality’ (‘Rindī-yi Ḥāfiẓ’, Bū-yi jān, p. 219).

  261 ‘The Visionary Topography of Hafiz’, pp. 224–5.

  262 See the essays by M. Sells and R. Woods in Barnard and Kripal (eds), Crossing Boundaries.

  263 I am referring to the fashionable view that conceptualizes the rind as merely a ‘debauchee’, and sees the qalandar as but a ‘dissolute hoodlum’, Ḥāfiẓ’s praise of the rind being viewed as simply ‘his championing of an anti-culture low-life’, conceiving that ‘to read anything other than social outcasts and men of ill-repute in Hafez’s rend and qalandar is to miss the point ... by rend Hafez did not mean anything other than a derelict, an embodiment of sin and dissoluteness occupying the basest position in society’ (Ehsan Yarshuter, ‘Hafez I. An Overview’, EIr, XI, p. 463). Advocates of this viewpoint consequently refuse to acknowledge that the poet’s usage of these terms can have any possible higher symbolic meaning, any refined mystical sense or, indeed, any esoteric significance at all. But assuming their views are correct leads to an extremely absurd conclusion. Namely, that – to take but a single instance – the demandingly complex and intricately argued 3,000-page commentary written by Abū’l-Ḥasan ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Khatmī Lāhūrī on Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān is complete balderdash. This seems to be exactly what the same scholar argues when he categorically asserts that ‘reading Hafez as codified poetry implying an esoteric meaning’ is ‘not dissimilar to the explanations offered by addicts of “conspiracy theories” in political affairs’ (ibid., p. 464). In Iranian intellectual circles, reductionist views based on this sort of socio-political ‘new criticism’ unfortunately represent by no means a minority opinion today – even if such theories have been refuted by solid text-based research into the Dīvān by formidable and serious scholars such as Khurramshāhī, Fouchécour, Pūrnāmdāriyān and Isti‘lāmī. One reason for these distortions is that the horizons of Ḥāfiẓ’s poetic cosmology are so broad as to allow his admirers and enthusiasts to easily mould his verses to suit their own earthly or heavenly preconceptions, and so he has been labelled everything from free-thinker (āzād-andīsh), to Mazdean, to orthodox Shī‘ite, to faithless agnostic (ibāḥī), to philosopher, to Ḥurūfī... For a survey of the wide divergence of scholarly opinion about the poet, see Qarāguzlū, ‘Ḥāfiẓ dar miyān-i haftād u dū millat’, pp. 61–74.

  264 Zarrīnkūb, Az kūcha-i rindān, pp. 47–8.

  265 Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, I, p. 408. Elsewhere Khurramshāhī writes: ‘The tolerance, open-mindedness, liberality and humaneness which are visible for all to see in Ḥāfiẓ’s crystalline verses, have caused those so-called “free-thinkers” without any particular religious commitm
ent and without any interest in gnostic spirituality, to fall into the delusion and harbour the mistaken conception that he was such a free-thinker who was weak in his own faith.’ Ibid., I, p. 3. A similar observation is made by N. Pūrjavādī, ‘Rindī-yi Ḥāfiẓ’, Bū-yi jān, p. 330. On Ḥāfiẓ’s personal religious views, particularly concerning eschatology, see Khurramshāhī, ‘Ḥāfiẓ va inkār-i ma‘ād?’, in his Dhihn u zabān-i Ḥāfiẓ, pp. 93–123.

  266 On which see Murtaḍawī, Maktab-i Ḥāfiẓ, p. 418.

  267 Sārimī, Muṣṭalahāt-i ‘irfānī wa mafāhīm-i bar-jasta dar zabān-i ‘Aṭṭār, pp. 329–33.

  268 Pūrjavādī, ‘Rindī-yi Ḥāfiẓ’, Bū-yi jān, p. 228.

  269 The phrase is Zarrīnkūb’s coinage, from the title of his study of Ḥāfiẓ: ‘Down Rogues’ Alley’ (Az kūcha-i rindān, pp. 3–5, 7–8).

  270 Limbert, Shīrāz in the Age of Hafez, pp. 104–5.

  271 Gulistān-i Sa‘dī, ed. Khaṭīb Rahbar, II: 40, p. 221.

  272 For the one ghazal in which he uses this phrase, see Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 186: 6.

  273 Murtaḍawī, Maktab-i Ḥāfiẓ, p. 145, n. 1; Pūrnāmdāriyān, Gumshuda-yi lab-i daryā, p. 24.

  274 Shayegan, ‘The Visionary Topography of Ḥāfiẓ’, in Temenos, p. 224.

  275 Zarrīnkūb rightly speculates that ‘the careless desperado attitude and their notoriety-seeking of the hoodlums [rindān] may have been interpreted as a model for mystical detachment’, Az kūcha-i rindān, p. 4.

  276 Pūrnāmdāriyān underlines that ‘The rind in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry is not the marketplace ruffian [rind-i bazārī] whose entire character personified avarice and hypocrisy, but, rather, the collegiate and intellectual libertine [rind-i madrasī va rawshanfikrī]’, Gumshuda-yi lab-i daryā, p. 24.

  277 Cf. ‘Rindī-yi Ḥāfiẓ’, in Pūrjavādī, Bū-yi jān, p. 286.

  278 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 93: 3. My translation is based on Isti‘lāmī’s interpretation (Dars-i Ḥāfiẓ, I, p. 303), but follows Khānlarī’s text of the verse. On various interpretations of this verse, see Khurramshāhī, Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, I, pp. 407, 440 and Lāhūrī, Sharḥ-i ‘irfānī, I, pp. 443–4.

  279 Zarrīnkūb, Az kūcha-i rindān, p. 51.

  280 As Ghanī relates (Baḥth dar āthār, I, p. 215), this nickname was given to him by his son and assassin-successor Shāh Shujā‘ in a distich which Ḥāfiẓ here paraphrases: ‘The libertines [rindān] have forsworn their love for wine – all of them, that is, except the policeman who’s drunk without wine.’

  281 Cited by Ghanī, Baḥth dar āthār, I, p. 216, this verse is found in manuscript ‘L’ in Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 122.

  282 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 312: 1.

  283 Ibid., ghazal 150: 8. The original Persian is ‘Ishq u shabāb u rindī majmū‘a murād-ast/ chūn jam‘ shud ma‘ānī, gū-y bayān tavān zad. In the above translation, ‘Unbound romance’ renders the idea of rindī. The term ma‘ānī by way of the poetic device of amphibology (īhām) alludes to the science of ideas and rhetoric (‘ilm-i ma‘ānī va bayān) in literary theory, whilst in grammar, ma‘ānī denotes the underlying meanings of a poet’s ideas, with bayān signifying ‘the clarity of speech or expression, and the faculty by which clarity is attained’. Thus, ‘ilm al-bayān (the science of expression’) is considered to be a sub-section of the science of eloquence (‘ilm al-balāgha), and bayān (‘speech’) itself is defined as ‘whatever lifts the veil from a concealed idea (ma‘nā)’ (Abū Ṭāhir al-Baghdādī, Qanūn al-balāgha, cited by G.E. von Grunebaum, ‘Bayān’, EI2, I, p. 1114). (Also cf. Khurramshāhī, Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, I, p. 611.) Although these grammatical and literary significations of ma‘ānī and bayān in this verse are important (contrary to what Isti‘lāmī, Dars-i Ḥāfiẓ, I, pp. 444–5, argues), conveying the idea that when ideas are rightly assembled one can speak finely, the meaning of the verse has little to do with such literary and rhetorical connotations. To understand Ḥāfiẓ’s particular use of the term ma‘ānī (plu. of ma‘nā) in this verse, the philosophical meaning of the term ma‘nā needs to be understood. I have translated ma‘ānī as inner sens here because, as Julie Scott Meisami points out, ‘The poetic use of the terms ma‘nā, ma‘nawī, suggests something similar to the significatio or sen referred to by the medieval European poets as the “deeper meaning” underlying the surface of the poem’ (‘Allegorical Gardens in the Persian Poetic Traditions’, p. 259, n. 71). The ma‘ānī, which the poet states need to be assembled in order to speak properly, are the archetypal meanings, or ideal realities or spiritual meanings underlying the phenomena of which they are mere shadows, as is elaborated by Shabistarī in the Gulshan-i rāz (in Muwaḥḥid, ed., Majmu‘a-i athar, p. 97, vv. 721–4; this passage is discussed in detail in my Beyond Faith and Infidelity, pp. 181–3). Furthermore, Ḥāfiẓ’s meaning is better comprehended once we realize that he was paraphrasing the following two verses from Rūmī’s Dīvān-i Shams, which summarize the esoteric meaning of his verse perfectly (Ḥāfiẓ’s poem is in the Baḥr-i muḍāra‘-i musaddas-i akhrab u sālim metre, whereas Rūmī’s poem is in the Baḥr-i muḍāra‘-i musaddas-i akhrab-i makfūf-i maḥzūf metre: they are very similar): ‘Love and loverhood and youth and things like these / Came together [to make the] Spring’s delight and sat beside each other. // They had no form and then they came merrily into form. / That is to say: the imaginal entities have become cast into phenomenal forms. Just look!’ (Mastī u ‘āshiqī u javāvī u jins–i īn / Āmad bahār-i khurram u gashtand hamnishīn // Ṣūrat nadāshtand, muṣawwar shudan khwush / Ya‘nī mukhayyilāt muṣawwar shudeh bibīn). In this sense, both poets’ verses allude to the combination of what Avicenna called intellecta (Arabic: ma‘ānī ma‘qūla: intelligible notions or abstract ideas), which determine and cause – similar to Plato’s Ideas (cf. Rūmī, Mathnawī, ed. Nicholson, VI: 3180) – the descent of all phenomena into this sentient realm and determine their ‘formulation’ into objects of sense (cf. Oliver Leaman, ‘Ma‘nā. 2. In Philosophy’ EI2, VI, p. 347). As Lāhūrī (Sharḥ-i ‘irfānī, II, p. 1213) comments on the verse: ‘in love and youth is manifest both the spiritual and physical powers of man in their [best] condition, and in unbound romance [rindī] is obtained detachment from worldly interests, and thus these three comprise the sum of the wayfarer’s desires.’ In sum, man’s rational soul (nafs-i nāṭiqa) obtains the perfection of its powers in unbound romance (rindī) and love and youth, for these three are physical signs of the perfection of those supersensible realities (ma‘ānī), signs that serve to ‘actualize’ all the possible objectives (majmū‘a-yi murād) of the soul, and allow it to perfectly ‘express’ – itself that is, to become rational (= human).

  284 But for an interesting reading of Rimbaud as a Sufi poet, however, see Adonis, Sufism and Surrealism, trans. J. Cumberbatch, pp. 193–211.

  285 Cf. Lewis Hyde’s study of Trickster Makes the World: Mischief, Myth and Art, p. 13.

  286 ‘Lines to Fanny’, in Keats, Complete Poems, p. 362.

  287 Cited by Khurramshāhī, Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, I, p. 404. For further references and definitions of rind, see Dhū’l-Riyāsitayn, Farhang-i vāzhahā-yi īhāmī dar ash‘ār-i Ḥāfiẓ, pp. 222–3; F. Lewis, ‘Hafez and Rendi’, pp. 483–91; Mazār‘ī, Mafhūm-i rindī dar shi‘r-i Ḥāfiẓ, pp. 104–51.

  288 A saying ascribed to the malāmatī master Ḥamdūn Qaṣṣār (d. 271/884) by Hujwīrī, Kashf al-maḥjūb, ed. Zhukovskii, p. 74, line 2.

  289 De Bruijn, ‘Rind’, EI2, VIII, p. 531; idem., ‘The Qalandariyyat in Persian Mystical Poetry, from Sana’i Onwards’, pp. 75–86; see also Skalmowski, ‘Le Qalandar chez Ḥāfeẓ’, pp. 275–86.

  290 Javad Nurbakhsh, Sufi Symbolism, vol. 6, pp. 123f.

  291 On Ḥāfiẓ and qalandariyya doctrine, see Bukhārā’ī, Farhang-i ash‘ār-i Ḥāfiẓ, pp. 551–5; De Bruijn, ‘Hafez’s Poetic Art’, pp. 473f.

  292 Zarrīnk
ūb, Az kūcha-i rindān, p. 4; Mazār‘ī, Mafhūm-i rindī dar shi‘r-i Ḥāfiẓ, pp. 55ff.; Khurramshāhī, Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, I, pp. 404–6; Āshūrī, ‘Irfān u rindī dar shi‘r-i Ḥāfiẓ, pp. 287–303.

  293 Dīvān-i ‘Aṭṭār, ed. Tafaḍḍulī, p. 64.

  294 Trimingham, The Sufi Orders in Islam, pp. 266f., citing Suhrawardī’s ‘Awārif.

  295 Zarrīnkūb, Justujū’ī dar taṣawwuf-i Irān, pp. 336ff.

  296 T. Yazizi, ‘Ḳalandariyya’, EI2, IV, p. 473; on Sāvī and the qalandars, see Ahmet Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends, pp. 40–4.

  297 Bar dar-i maykada rindān-i qalandar bāshand / kay satānand va dahand afsar-i shāhanshāhī. In Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 479: 3.

  298 See Richard Onians, The Origins of European Thought, pp. 343–8, cited by Hyde, Trickster, p. 43.

  299 In Shelley, Complete Poems, p. 334; Hellas, II: 766–806.

  300 Cf. George Herbert’s memorable verse (from the poem ‘Content’): ‘Give me the pliant mind whose gentle measure / Complies and suits with all estates; / Which can let loose to a crown, and yet with pleasure / Take up within a cloister’s gates.’

  301 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 174: 6–7.

  302 Ibid., ghazals 174: 7; 442: 6.

  303 Ibid., ghazals 79: 7; 366: 2; 389: 8; 479: 3.

  304 On which, see Mu‘īn, Ḥāfiẓ-i shīrīn-sukhan, I, pp. 436–7; Rajā’ī Bukhārā’ī, Farhang-i ash‘ār-i Ḥāfiẓ, pp. 551–5. Cf. Ritter’s discussion (Ocean, pp. 502–6) of Ḥāfiẓ’s qalandariyyāt.

  305 Murtaḍawī in his Maktab-i Ḥāfiẓ, pp. 113–47, devotes an entire chapter to his malāmatī thought and Mu‘īn features an extensive discussion of the same in his Ḥāfiẓ-i shīrīn-sukhan, I, pp. 425–37. See also the following note.

  306 Adapted from Khurramshāhī, ‘Andīshahā-yi malāmatī-yi Ḥāfiẓ’, in his Chārdah ravāyat, pp. 74–86; also reproduced in idem., Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, II, pp. 1090–7, where suitable verses from the Dīvān are given to illustrate each doctrine.