Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 18

  Erotomaniacs is what we are: lovesots;

  The Muslims they’re a different lot. We’re spindly ants;

  King Solomon’s another sort. A burning, aching heart

  And sallow faces seek of us: the abattoir’s on a different street.18

  Know it for certain that the lover’s not a Muslim

  For in the creed of love there’s neither infidelity

  Or faith – once you fall in love, you have no body,

  No soul, no heart, no mind: who ain’t like this, ain’t nothin.19

  In his mystical epic ‘The Rhyming Spiritual Couplets’ (Mathnawī-yi ma‘nawī), Rūmī frequently celebrates the ‘Religion of Love’ as well. The following verse from his Mathnawī constitutes his most famous statement concerning the pre-eminence of this higher secta amoris:

  Love’s state is apart

  from religions and faith

  God is the lover’s creed –

  God is the lover’s state.20

  The Religion of Love in Ḥāfiẓ

  Ḥāfiẓ is Persia’s greatest erotic lyricist who remains the supreme – and in some senses the last – prophet of the Religion of Love in Persian literature. There are many verses in his ghazals that appear as a manifesto of this transcendental creed:

  Both human beings and spirits take their sustenance

  From the existence of love. The practice of devotion

  Is a good way to arrive at happiness in both worlds.21

  Become a lover; if you don’t, one day the affairs of the world

  Will come to an end, and you’ll never have had even

  One glimpse of the purpose of the workings of space and time.22

  In Persian literature, the Prophet Ḥāfiẓ’s collected poems (Dīvān) constitute a sacred scripture which, just like the works of Sa'dī, is a faithful reflection of the divine Beloved’s countenance. Both poets were prophets; both composed poetic Scriptures that remain miracles of beauty in Persian, their verses appearing as divine signs (āyat) of loveliness and grace. For Ḥāfiẓ, the entire world reflects the grace and loveliness of the divine countenance, for, insofar as ‘Wheresoever you turn, there is the Face of God’ (Qur’ān, II: 115), that Face reveals and casts a ray of the infinite divine beauty in the mirrors of man, cosmos, microcosm and macrocosm:23

  Your beautiful face divulged to us

  the chapter and verse of divine grace,

  which is why nothing exists

  save grace and comeliness

  in our scriptural exegesis.24

  This same theophany of beauty also cast its ray upon Ḥāfiẓ’s verse, gleams of which were reflected through various poetic images such as ‘Idol’ (but), ‘Christian child’ (tarsā-bachchih), ‘Magian child’ (mugh-bachchih), ‘Cup-bearer’ (sāqī) and ‘Friend’ (yār). When these images are apprehended by any reader attuned to Ḥāfiẓ’s symbolic universe, they arouse intoxication and selflessness, freeing one from conceit, self-centredness and egotism. Thus, in the following verse in his Dīvān, we see how the ‘Magian child’ appears to rob the poet of his egocentric faith and initiate him into love’s esoteric creed:

  Just when the Magi’s child strolled along (the thief

  of hearts and wrecker of belief)

  At once the Muslim puritan was carried off,

  from all his friends divorced himself.25

  Ḥāfiẓ’s religion of love teaches devotion to that essential Beauty whose loveliness reappears time and time again in the guise of various symbols among other Sufi poets.26 This is particularly evident in the lines from the following ghazal, which is one of the most famous erotic poems in all of Persian literature:

  Her hair was still tangled, her mouth drunk

  And laughing, her shoulders sweaty, the blouse

  Torn open, singing love songs, her hand holding a wine cup.

  Her eyes were looking for a drunken brawl, her mouth

  Full of jibes. And this being sat down

  Last night at midnight on my bed.

  She put her lips close to my ear and said

  In a mournful whisper these words: ‘What is this?

  Aren’t you my old lover – Are you asleep?’

  The friend of wisdom who receives

  This wine that steals sleep is a traitor to love

  If he doesn’t worship that same wine.27

  As the last stanza indicates, Ḥāfiẓ professes that anyone who does not revel in drinking the wine of love is a heretic and traitor to love’s creed (kāfar-i ‘ishq). This statement makes better sense if we decode the reference to wine as being metaphorical of the theophany of beauty in the raiment of mortal beings. In the most important mystical commentary on the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ, written by Sayf al-Dīn ‘Abū’l-Ḥasan ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Khatmī Lāhūrī (fl. seventeenth century in India), the commentator, when explaining this poem, alludes to the particular meaning given to the term ‘infidel’, or ‘traitor’ or ‘heretic’ (kāfar) in the philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabī, as being ‘someone who conceals the existence of God through manifestation of existing phenomena’.28 Lāhūrī explains that the mystic versed in Sufi erotic theology should not allow phenomena to veil his vision of Noumena, and should realize that the transcendent beauty must – and can only – be contemplated through the translucent veil of human beauty. Paraphrasing Ḥāfiẓ, Lāhūrī states:

  That Transcendent Beloved Being then spoke, stating that any gnostic who is a confidant of the arcane mysteries, who recognizes the true face of such an affair, when given such a wine – that is, beauty and loveliness decked out in the garb of the veiled presentment of a figurative mortal sweetheart – will only end up veiling and concealing this display of God, this divine theophany, unless he does becomes a worshipper of beauty [ḥusn-parast]. This is because it is through the forms of mortal beauty [suwar-i husniyya] that God-as-Absolute in reality attracts the hearts of lovers to Himself.29

  For Ḥāfiẓ, as for the other followers of the religion of love, this adoration of beauty (jamāl-parastī) reveals itself through the cult’s opposition to the self-aggrandizing Sharī‘a-oriented Islam of the common mob of Muslims. To relish the taste of this erotic faith, say the Sufi poets, one must divorce old barren reason from bed (along with its religion pursued for selfish worldly ends) and take the daughter of the vine to spouse instead, just as Iran’s greatest bacchanalian poet ‘Umar Khayyām (d. circa 519/1125–527/1132) taught.30 Edward Fitzgerald, in his classic translation of Khayyām, while slightly misrepresenting the letter, perfectly conveys the spirit of this idea in this quatrain:

  You know, my Friends, how long since in my House

  For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:

  Divorced old barren reason from my Bed,

  And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.31

  Ḥāfiẓ also uses exactly the same terminology to refer to his conversion to this transcendental nonconformist religion of love. He sprinkles his verse with a variety of terms to this end: ‘Love’s creed’ (madhhab-i ‘ishq),32 the ‘Magian master’s faith’ (madhhab-i pīr-i mughān),33 the ‘creed of inspired libertines’ (madhhab-i rindān),34 the ‘faith of the Sufi Path’ (madhhab-i ahl-i ṭarīqat)35 and, occasionally, simply ‘our creed’ (madhhab-i mā).36 Among these terms, each of which have a slightly different connotation in his erotic spirituality, the following verses comprise his key statements:

  Don’t allow the flirty side-glances of beauties

  To teach you injustice. We know that in the religion of love

  Each act returns with its own consequences.37

  * * *

  The only prayer apse

  The heart of Ḥāfiẓ has

  Is your eyebrow’s arch

  For in our faith

  It’s you alone, none else

  Commands obeisance.38

  * * *

  Above homage and obeisance to lunatics

  Do not seek more from us, for our sect’s master

  Professed all intellectualism to be wickedness.39


  * * *

  ‘To wear the dervish robe and then to drink wine,

  That’s not a rite of true doctrine.’

  I said. ‘Indeed,’ she said, ‘but in the Magian

  Master’s rite of faith, that’s all holy doctrine.’40

  * * *

  I followed the path of the mad libertines for years

  Long enough, until I was able, with the decree

  Of intelligence, to put my greediness into prison.41

  * * *

  On the spiritual road, being uncooked and raw

  Is a mark of unbelief; it’s best to move along the path

  Of fortune with nimbleness and springy knees.42

  While much of the poetry of Rūmī, Sa'dī and Ḥāfiẓ has been penned by way of exposition of the Religion of Love, the abstruse spiritual principles of this faith remain virtually unknown to many students of Islamic thought, whether in the East or in the West. Below I will provide an overview of the basic principles of Islam’s erotic theology as depicted by the classical Persian poets, illustrated by examples from the Qur’ān and Persian literature.

  The Primordial Disposition of Man and the Religion of Love

  According to the Qur’ān, man was created with an ‘original disposition that God instilled within him’ (fiṭrat Allāh) and formed with a ‘fundamentally immutable God-given nature’ (lā-tabdīl li-khalqi’llāhi: XXX: 30). Basing themselves on this evidence from their holy scripture, Persian poets drove this classical theological doctrine up several theosophical notches higher, maintaining that man’s nature had been already moulded and framed to develop according to the nature of the divine attributes of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, and inclined to follow the ‘Straight Path of Love and Mercy’ (‘ishq, maḥabbat, raḥmat) long before birth. As human beings, we thus enter the world with faith in the divine innately deposited within the depths of our selves, for, according to the Prophet’s renowned saying: ‘Every child is born according to his original disposition [fiṭra]; then his parents make him into a Jew, a Christian, or a Zoroastrian.’43

  Therefore, in the narrow sectarian sense of the word, no one is ‘born’ a Muslim44 – much less a Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Jew or Zoroastrian – but rather every person is moulded into becoming a ‘believer’ subject to the influence of their parents, wider society and cultural environment. At the same time, it should be emphasized that all these faiths, setting aside the excrescences, excesses and superfluities to which each has been heir, is quintessentially moulded according to that same God-given ‘original disposition’ within humankind. Thus, all the world’s religions may be viewed as divergent manifestations of that one primordial faith of man – that is, the religion of his original disposition (fiṭra).

  Each of these faiths, having its own fair share of opportunistic power-seeking, theological deviance, sanctimonious cant, snobbish bias, hypocritical pretence, unctuous piety, priggish affectation and bigoted prejudice, along with a host of other vices, has become separated from and spurned its sister, considering its fellow travellers in the realms of Faith as damned – apostates, infidels or heretics, destined for Hades and Gehenna. Nonetheless, in every religion one can always find a small number of true adepts, saints and men of God, who are its spiritually realized gnostics and poets who are attuned to the Divine. Among this elect company one finds few divergences and disagreements save in respect to terminological expressions and modes of ritual practice pertaining to incidental forms of exoteric dogma, which are irrelevant to the quintessential reality of their faith. The true believers within every religion, as Rūmī puts it, are like rays of a single lamp:

  If ten lamps are together in one place

  each one is different from the next in form.

  You cannot tell apart the light of each

  when you are looking at them, there is no doubt.45

  Whatever their exterior denomination, the soul and spirit of the faithful reflects their insight into God’s comprehensive mercy which encompasses and embraces all men, good and ill alike:

  Besides the soul and understanding in

  the ass and cow, there’s a sense and soul in man

  that’s different. Again, besides this human sense

  and intellect, the saintly souls in bliss

  have higher cognizance. The souls of brutes

  possess no unity; from that anima vitalis

  don’t seek for oneness. If a single base

  man eat some bread, another man who’s base

  will not be full, and if one brute bears weights

  his neighbour’s not distressed. No, he rejoices

  to hear he’s died, or dies of jealousy

  when good accrues to him or profit sees

  has come to him. Thus, souls of dogs and wolves

  are set in castes apart: yet there’re no halves,

  but only wholes in lions’ souls.46

  Therefore, it is wrong to assert we enter into the world devoid of all faith and belief and only subsequently personally select a religion for ourselves. On the contrary, each person is born with love for the Good, Beautiful and True innately instilled within him. If he doesn’t deviate from the ‘straight path of his original disposition’, this primordial love will mature and develop within him and direct him along his course in life. The sole purpose underlying the mission of the prophets in the various religions is to bring people back to that original disposition. The reason we need to hearken to their summons is that our original spiritual disposition, exactly like our physical metabolism, is constantly plagued by myriad diseases, afflicted with moral and/or metaphysical amnesia due to various hindrances which impede its healthy progress and block its natural advancement. The different heavenly scriptures of the world’s faiths brought by their prophets are analogous to medicinal cures for these ailments. They are reminders to men, while their various legal codes – Canon Law (sharī‘a) – must be considered as different paths of development and maturation adapted to the diverse religious needs of various peoples. Insofar as the original disposition of man is one and the same, and all the prophets have been sent by the One God, it is unreasonable to assume that the religions of mankind should or can differ in their fundamental principles from each other. The mission of the prophets is thus precisely tailored to suit the original disposition of man, comprising a summons to contemplate the Good, Beautiful and True. In the words of Maḥmūd Shabistarī (d. after 740/1339):

  That Day when Faith was written down

  within the heart, the clay of man

  was moulded in the human form,

  The word of God was sent down then

  and holy books revealed to men

  so you’d recall your vow again.47

  In several places in the Qur’ān, allusion is made to the triad of these transcendent qualities that bring delight to the heart and salvation to the soul. As Rūmī puts it:

  Since prophethood’s the guide to liberty,

  Believers get their liberty from prophets free.48

  In the pursuit of goodness, knowledge and beauty, we receive such a sense of joy and experience so much rapture and delight that we even forget personal sorrow and grief; we become, as Sa'dī says, steeped so deep in the delight of contemplation that ‘all the world’s woes have no effect’. In Islamic erotic spirituality, this is best illustrated in the famous Sūrah XII (Joseph) in the Qur’ān, where we read how Zulaykhā, the wife of the Pharoah of Egypt, summoned a group of her Egyptian women friends to her palace. She wanted them to see her favourite slave-boy Joseph, with whom she was madly infatuated, for themselves. As soon as he strutted in the room, the ladies, who had all previously found fault with Zulaykhā for her passion for him, immediately recanted their prudery, being smitten by the overwhelming loveliness of his ‘human form divine’. Wildly besotted with him, they slit their wrists with the same knives she’d given them to peel fruit, exclaiming: ‘This is not a human being, but some gracious angel!’ (XII: 31). By preaching a religion of passi
onate love (‘ishq), poets such as Ḥāfiẓ or Sa'dī similarly intend to advocate the idea that by falling in love and observing the courtesies of lover and beloved, men and women may realize transports of consciousness unbeknownst to normative conformist religious piety. In this fashion, we may attain felicity and salvation both in this world and the next, which is, by the way, precisely the sense intended by Ḥāfiẓ’s well-known exhortation:

  Go strain your every nerve to gain the high degree of love;

  The benefits will be immense if only you could make that voyage.49

  Such is also the purport underlying Sa'dī’s celebrated description of the mystical ‘stages of love’ in these verses at the beginning of his Būstān:

  If you desire to chart your way across

  This ground, first hamstring all the horses

  You’d use to journey back. Then contemplate

  The mirror of your heart until the state

  Of purity you slowly find. If the perfume

  Of love befuddles you till you’re drunken,

  You’ll probe about to seek that timeless vow

  You made to God. Your quest’s on foot till now,

  But once you’re there, you’ll fly on wings of love,

  Till certainty the veil of phantasy

  Rends aside and nothing but the Court

  Of Majesty remains to veil your heart.50

  The Religion of Love and Antinomian Traditions in Islam