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

  This arabesque patterning brings to mind the discovery now being worked on by Mr Jason Elliot, and discussed in his book Mirrors of the Unseen.26 The theory is that behind the intricate plaster-work and mosaics in Iran’s ancient mosques, there is a series of persistent geometric designs. The arabesque pattern behind the imagery of the poetry seems to emanate from the same obsession with geometric symbols. This is an obsession that can be related to the constant longing on the part of Iranians – and indeed other Middle Easterners, if not all human beings – for order in place of chaos; in the case of the Iranians, for the trim pathways, canals and flowerbeds of gardens in place of the harshness, emptiness and tumbled rocks of the deserts beyond the garden walls.

  Recognition of arabesque thematic patterns in poetry is of course germane to the problems facing those who would endeavour to reconstruct the texts of Persian poetry of former times, correcting the inadvertences of omission or inclusion of false verses, and other errors attributable to the scribes who have copied the poems through the centuries. The order and genuineness of verses might be more easily established if attention is paid to the thematic recurrence of associated images such as John Heath-Stubbs noticed and other colleagues have subsequently studied in detail.

  But I must venture no further into the intricacies of textual criticism. Instead, I would just like to conclude with a plea that it should be remembered that Sir William Jones was at least right in calling his version of a famous Ḥāfiẓ poem A Persian Song. We must not, in dissecting and analysing the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ, forget that, whatever else he was, he was a singer. In his role as a poet he belonged to the class of minstrels: to use that word which is so difficult to translate, rind, in his guise as a poet, Ḥāfiẓ was of the type of rogues or scallywags. We are grateful to him, and to the troubadours, for it is through the power of song, of music, that great liberator of the soul from the body, that they preserved grace in an ever darkening world; grace, and a sense of humour, with fifes and drums.

  Cambridge, July 2007

  Notes

  1 Margaret Smith, Al-Ghazālī: The Mystic, p. 109.

  2 See A.J. Arberry’s admirable Fifty Poems of Hāfiz, Poem XLVIII, but also Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, II, p. 1057, Poem IV, where he gives a different reading in a quintuplet, mukhammas.

  3 Paris 1873, pp. 66–70.

  4 It has been argued that the title Lisān al-ghayb alludes not to Ḥāfiẓ in person, but to his words. However this may be, it is interesting that the historian Khwāndamīr also accords Ḥāfiẓ the title Tarjumān al-asrār (‘The Interpreter of the Secrets’) in his Habīb al-siyar, IV, pp. 314–15.

  5 Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, pp. 36–7.

  6 Dryden has the comment, ‘Mr. Cowley’s Praise of a Country Life is excellent, but is rather an imitation of Vergil than a version.’ In W.P. Ker (ed.), Essays of John Dryden, II, p. 244. It will be noted that here Dryden draws a distinction between ‘imitation’ and ‘version’ or ‘translation’.

  7 A Grammar of the Persian Language, p. 168.

  8 Hāfiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A Critical Bibliography – English Translations Since the Eighteenth Century, pp. 60–4.

  9 Peter Avery (trans.), The Collected Lyrics of Háfiz of S híráz, Poem III, p. 21.

  10 London: Allen & Unwin 1958; reprinted Surrey: Curzon Press 1994.

  11 See note 8 above.

  12 Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006. See particularly pp. 61ff. and the Index under ‘Preordination’ and ‘Covenant’.

  13 See Zaehner, Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma for an exposition of the connection in Firdausī’s concept of predestination with what was in fact a Zoroastrian heresy, the belief that the cosmos is ruled by Time.

  14 Qur’ān, VII, p. 172.

  15 For example, in the dialogue poem (Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 194: 1) where the person addressed replies Gufta bih chashm harchih tū gū’ī chunān kunand, where the phrase beginning with bih chashm can be translated as: ‘Sure, whatever you say, so they will act.’

  16 Cf. R. Shafaq, Tārīkh-i adabīyāt-i Īrān, p. 333, and Arberry, Fifty Poems, p. 16.

  17 Arberry, Fifty Poems; Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, cf. pp. ix–x above.

  18 Habīb as-Sīyar, III, p. 315.

  19 Baḥth dar āthār u afkār u aḥwāl-i Ḥāfiẓ, vol. 1: Tārīkh-i ‘aṣr-i Ḥāfiẓ yā tārīkh-i fārs va maḍāfāt va iyālāt-i mujāvarih dar qarn-i hashtum.

  20 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 458: 4.

  21 See J. Christoph Bürgel’s article ‘Ambiguity: A Study in the Use of Religious Terminology in the Poems of Hafiz’, in Glünz and Bürgel (eds), Intoxication, Earthly and Heavenly: Seven Studies on the Poet Hafiz of S hīrāz.

  22 Translation by E.G. Browne, Chahār Maqāla, pp. 49–50.

  23 See A.J. Arberry, ‘Orient Pearls At Random Strung’, pp. 699–712.

  24 Khwāndamīr, Habīb al-siyar.

  25 Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs (trans.), Hafiz of S hīrāz: Thirty Poems.

  26 Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran.

  Editor’s Introduction and Acknowledgements

  Tempus omnia revelat, Ḥāfiẓ’s verse preserves its immortality through contemporaneity. Ḥāfiẓ has street-touch. Comparing Ḥāfiẓ with the Bard, Peter Avery recalls in his Foreword above how much easier it is for the native – even an illiterate – Iranian to interpret the complicated theological, mystical and social references in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry, to revel in the nuances of his allusions, understanding and reciting his verses by heart with refinement and depth of feeling than it is for the modern educated English person to appreciate even the most basic literary allusions of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Two external factors – literary and socio-linguistic – partially account for this. On the one hand, Persianate societies today remain bardic civilizations in which bricklayers sing the ghazals of Sa‘dī and Rūmī as they work, and discussion of the verse of Ḥāfiẓ and ‘Irāqī regularly enriches the common man’s hours of leisure. On the other, Iranians and Afghans and the natives of the other Persianate lands of Central Asia, such as Tajikistan, by and large speak exactly the same Persian tongue spoken in fourteenth-century Shīrāz by Ḥāfiẓ.

  The world of religious wars, theological controversies and embattled fanaticisms that choked and filled Ḥāfiẓ’s soul with the smoke and fumes of anti-clerical parodies and biting religious satire still prevails today – which is why his verse can accurately articulate and redress the same political passions that hold sway throughout the contemporary Persianate world. Whereas the fanaticisms and tribal sectarian quarrels over religion heard during Ḥāfiẓ’s day are still audible on an hourly basis in Iran today from pulpit, radio and television, only a tiny minority of trained historians can imaginatively relocate themselves within a Protestant police state of England during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. Linguistically as well, the language of Shakespeare’s plays appears to us as a quaint, archaic dialect at best, a dead language at the worst. Hence Ḥāfiẓ’s Sententiae – unlike many of Shakespeare’s – never grow out of date, today remaining as à propos to the modern context of political argument and social debate as they did in 1387 when, outside the ramparts of the city of Iṣfahān, Tamerlane erected minarets out of the severed sconces of its inhabitants.

  Albeit immanent in popular consciousness, most of Ḥāfiẓ’s mythopoesis – his language of analogy and capacity for thinking in symbols – is no longer part of the mental furniture of modern man. The aesthetic premises of his poetry are incomprehensible within the conceptual framework of modern anti-art movements such as surrealism, minimalism, abstract expressionism or ‘pop’ art, for the principles of his spiritual vision, being heart-based and focused on presential knowledge (‘ilm-i ḥudhūrī), are completely alien to the presuppositions of the modern materialist society of the West. If we are to gain access to Ḥāfiẓ’s ‘visionary topography’, as Daryoush Shayegan called it, recourse must be made to the fi
rst principles of the Islamic neo-Platonic tradition and to the traditional doctrines underlying the verse of all the Sufi poets who were intoxicated on the same bacchanalian metaphors and inspired by the same erotic images that fill his Dīvān.

  The central aim of the chapters in this volume is to enable contemporary Western students of classical Persian poetry to reconnect with that lost symbolic universe and hopefully re-initiate themselves into the mundus imaginalis of Ḥāfiẓ and the entire galaxy of Persian poets who spoke his ‘language of the invisible’. Even many modern educated Persians, afflicted by the anti-imaginative climate of the West, today find much of his symbolism incomprehensible. They delight in the great beauty of his poems but often view them as utterly meaningless. University-educated rationalists in Iran and Pakistan have deplored the metaphysical system behind Ḥāfiẓ’s poems and the religious and sacred aspect of his symbolism as a kind of superstitious absurdity that is no longer within the range of intellectually respectable ideas. The Pakistani philosopher Muḥammad Iqbāl (d. 1938) and the radical Iranian modernist Aḥmad Kasravī (d. 1946) thus both castigated Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry as socially ‘decadent’ and intellectually ‘backward’. Sensible men who wish to raise the material and technological level of society, or who equate progress in education exclusively with the study of the social or physical sciences today, can no longer relate to the Sufi ideals of spiritual ‘holy poverty’ (faqr) which were sustained by the all-enveloping culture of malāmatī spirituality and ethics that underpin radically unconventional statements by Ḥāfiẓ like these:

  Why speak of ‘shame’ when my good name

  Is itself made of shame and blame?

  Why do you ask of ‘name’ – you know I am

  Ashamed of all you’d call good name?1

  Unfortunately, just as Ḥāfiẓ’s Religion of Love celebrated by this volume is anathema to the turbaned puritans regnant in Iran’s ‘Islamic’ Republic, mention of his spiritual and metaphysical teachings remain largely taboo in the Academe, particularly in modern Persian Language and Literature departments in universities both East and West. Again, a strange similarity of bias between contemporary Ḥāfiẓology and academic Shakespeare studies exists. Since Frances Yates,2 it is an open secret among Shakespeare scholars that the Hermetic Rosicrucianism and neo-Platonic Occultism of Elizabethean thinkers such as John Dee (d. 1609) and Giordano Bruno (d. 1600)3 – along with the Christian Platonism of Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499)4 – comprise the central philosophical sources of Shakespeare’s teachings on love, yet the writings of these thinkers generally remain a body of ‘excluded knowledge’ which students are instructed not to investigate; mention Dee, Ficino or Bruno to the learned doctor of Shakespeare studies whose sere voice held his lecture hall spellbound – thereafter you talk to a box turtle. Ḥafiẓ studies today suffer from a similar conspiracy of silence. In modern literary studies and critical theory, especially in the contemporary West, the vertical purport and spiritual import of his symbolic imagery by and large are deliberately neglected, and the esoteric doctrines and metaphysical teachings inspiring his verse are treated as irrelevancies. Most interpretations of his poetry treat him simply as a brilliant court poet of an entirely secular and worldly bent. It is hoped that the chapters in the present volume, penned by the world’s leading experts in classical Persian poetry, will serve in some minor degree to redress the calumny of decades of collective critical neglect of the spiritual sources and metaphysical bases underlying Ḥāfiẓ’s teachings on love.

  Part I of the volume, which places ‘Ḥāfiẓ in the Socio-historical, Literary and Mystical Milieu of Medieval Persia’, comprises two sections. In the first prolegomenon, Ḥafiẓ’s oeuvre is contextualized within the medieval society of Shīrāz and in classical and modern Persian belles lettres. An overview of the little we know of Ḥafiẓ’s life and times is then presented, followed by a lengthy review and re-evaluation of the courtly milieu of his poems and an examination of his relationship – and lack thereof – to various princes and patrons mentioned in his poetry. Here, I underline the fact that Ḥafiẓ was not a court poet, or at least not a professional panegyrist in the traditional sense of the word. An assessment of some of the causes of his supreme position in classical Persian lyrical poetry is also offered.

  The second prolegomenon aims to summarize the key teachings of Ḥafiẓ’s erotic spirituality. In particular, I explore the social, literary and metaphysical dimensions of the poet’s most important symbol: the Inspired Libertine (rind). A survey of the erotic ethic of his romantic philosophy of rindī is offered, along with an outline of the two related contemplative disciplines practised by its fedeli d’amore: the Art of Erotic Contemplation (shāhid-bāzī) and the Art of the Erotic Gaze: Contemplation of Human Beauty (naẓar-bāzī). This section concludes with a study of Ḥāfiẓ’s malāmatī ethic and his praise of the rite of the spiritual vagabonds (qalandarī).

  Part II comprises three chapters devoted to the subject of ‘Ḥāfiẓ and the School of Love in Classical Persian Poetry’.

  In the volume’s keynote chapter on ‘The Principles of the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry’, one of Iran’s most popular contemporary thinkers, Husayn Ilahi-Ghomshei, surveys the main themes and principles of the transcendental Religion of Love, madhhab-i ‘ishq, in Persian and Arabic Sufi literature, as well as in classical Persian poetry. He shows how the sources of this mystical erotic doctrine appear both in the writings of the two great Sufi martyrs – Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj (executed 304/922) and ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt Hamadhānī (executed 526/1132) – as well as in the earliest Persian court poets such as Rūdākī Samarqandī (d. 329/940) and Sanā’ī of Ghazna (d. 525/1131). Likewise, he points out how manifestations of the doctrines of that same School of Love can be found in the writings of Arab mystical poet–philosophers such as Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn al-‘Arabī (d. 638/1240) and ‘Umar ibn Fāriḍ (d. 633/1235), and in the Persian poetry of Niẓāmī of Ganja (d. 598/1202), ‘Aṭṭār of Nishapur (d. 618/1221 or 627/1229), Sa‘dī (d. circa 691/1292) and Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/1273). The spiritual traditions that sustained this madhhab-i ‘ishq and the terms in classical Persian literature which referred to antinomian mystics – qalandars (vagabonds, wild men), rind (inspired libertine), qallāsh (knave), mubāḥī (libertine), dīvāna (lunatic) and lā-ubālī (daredevil, desperado) – are analysed by the author, with appropriate verses by Sa‘dī and Ḥāfiẓ praising both the daredevil lā-ubālī and the wildman qalandar attitude, cited to contextualize their doctrines. In Ḥāfiẓ’s erotic spirituality, with his penchant for terms such as ‘Love’s creed’ (madhhab-i ‘ishq), the ‘Magian master’s faith’ (madhhab-i pīr-i mughān) and the ‘creed of inspired libertines’ (madhhab-i rindān), those same doctrines again appear.

  In the following chapter on ‘The Erotic Spirit: Love, Man and Satan in Ḥāfiẓ’s Poetry’, Ali Asghar Seyed-Gohrab demonstrates how a mystical theory of love can be reconstructed from Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān. Ḥāfiẓ’s reliance on the Islamic creation myth as developed by the Persian Sufi mystics such as Najm ad-Dīn Rāzī over the preceding centuries, and his combination of bacchanalian imagery of wine and erotic love poetry with familiar Qur’ānic traditions and Persian Sufi doctrines, enabled him to succeed ‘in interweaving the mystical version of the creation myth with a philosophy of earthly love’. Ḥāfiẓ’s use of the term love corresponds entirely with his predecessors such as Sanā’ī, ‘Aṭṭār and Niẓāmī, who were all influenced by Aḥmad Ghazālī’s (d. 520/1126) seminal treatise Savāniḥ, the founding text of the School of Love in Sufism and the tradition of love poetry in Persian. Knowledge of the background of Sufi thought, argues Seyed-Gohrab – and, in particular, the ascetic (zuhdiyyāt), bacchic (khamriyyāt) and antinomian (qalandariyyāt) themes in his poetry – enriches our experience of reading Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry.

  Leili Anvar, in her lovely chapter on ‘The Radiance of Epiphany: The Vision of Beauty and Love in Ḥāfiẓ’s Poem of Pre-Eterni
ty’, also emphasizes Ḥāfiẓ’s debt to the allusive poetic eroticism of Aḥmad Ghazālī’s Savāniḥ. The trans-rational nature of the experience of love and the impossibility of expressing erotic experiences prosaically, emphasized by Ghazālī, made Ḥāfiẓ’s choice of poetry as the language of love the perfect vehicle of expression, but one which necessarily – paradoxically – remains elusive to rational analysis. Exploring Ḥāfiẓ’s conception of the Qur’ānic theme (VII: 172) of the ‘Day of Pre-Eternity’ or ‘Day of the Covenant’ (rūz-i alast) in pre-eternity, in what she calls his ghazal of pre-eternity, her chapter explores a number of Ḥāfiẓ’s key themes – Love, Beauty, Grief (the paradox of joy in pain) and Longing – demonstrating how his erotic poeticization of these ideas have their literary sources in the topos of the religion of love in classical Persian poetry.

  Sufism is the dominant tradition of Islamic spirituality that influenced Ḥāfiẓ and the most significant source of the imagery and symbolism in his Dīvān. For this reason a separate section of this volume (the three chapters in Part III) is devoted to ‘Ḥāfiẓ and the Persian Sufi Tradition’.

  After a lifetime of study of Ḥāfiẓ and the translation of his entire poetic oeuvre into French, Charles Henri de Fouchécour in his opening chapter on ‘Ḥāfiẓ and the Sufi’ underlines the importance of the fourteenth century as an epoch in Islamic civilization which saw the establishment of the great Sufi Orders throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and India. The author examines Ḥāfiẓ’s wine symbolism and bacchanalian expressions, viewing them as comprising ‘a language of mystery’ alluding ‘to something experienced’, and yet indefinable and ‘unthinkable rationally’. In this respect, he states that Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān follows precisely the same bacchanalian Sufi hermeneutic proposed by Maḥmūd Shabistarī in his Garden of Mystery, who had demonstrated how profane poetic imagery could be used to vividly convey ideas of a spiritual order. Professor Fouchécour also gives a rough sketch of the Sufi world in which Ḥāfiẓ was situated, revealing the role played in it by key Sufi poets such as ‘Imād al-Dīn Faqīh Kirmānī (d. 773/1372), one of Ḥāfiẓ’s famous contemporaries. Surveying the mystical–intellectual terrain of the age, he analyses Ḥāfiẓ’s very strong criticisms of the Sufis and examines the poet’s Sufi terminology. He concludes that ‘despite these strictures, Ḥāfiẓ declares the path of Sufism to be a good one, on one condition, however – that it lead beyond itself. As a way composed of rules, the Sufi Path should lead to where no rule exists save the Rule of Love ... [where] the entire hierarchy of perfection is abolished.’