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

  My chapter on ‘The Religion of Love and the Puritans of Islam: Sufi Sources of Ḥāfiẓ’s Anti-clericalism’ illustrates Ḥāfiẓ’s role as Islam’s supreme anti-clerical and anti-puritan poet. The desiccated Muslim piety of the ascetic (zāhid) is contrasted to the higher religion of Eros held by the poet’s inspired libertine (rind); the dichotomy and difference in spiritual attitudes between the two – the latter’s focus on outer rituals versus the former’s inner contemplative ‘intention’ – is shown to be derived from the teachings of early Persian Sufis such as Kalābadhī and Junayd. The Sufi ethical and metaphysical doctrines sustaining his opposition to religious hypocrisy and sanctimony are analysed in detail. Ḥāfiẓ’s predominant social attitude is shown to be anti-hypocritical, and his condemnation of hypocrisy as the ‘supreme sin’ traced back to its antecedents in Sufi thought: Anṣārī and Ghazālī in particular. Lastly, the Sufi sources of Ḥāfiẓ’s counter-ethic of malāmatī bacchanalian piety, which redresses counterfeit religiosity and remedies the vice of hypocrisy, are explored. His theology of sin (counterbalancing the vice of pride, sin functions as an adjunct of humility), with its roots in the Sufi doctrine of Najm al-Dīn Rāzī and Rashīd al-Dīn Maybudī, is subjected to detailed analysis. The chapter concludes that the emphasis on God’s mercy and forgiveness (‘afw) of sin is the fundamental keynote theme of Ḥāfiẓ’s moral theology.

  Carl Ernst concludes this part of the volume with a study of ‘Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’s Interpretation of Ḥāfiẓ’. Davānī (d. 908/1502) was a famous late classical Iranian mystical philosopher who lived a little less than a century after Ḥāfiẓ’s death in Shīrāz. He wrote one of the earliest, if not the very first, separate commentary on his poetry, approaching the poet’s verses from three perspectives: those of the philosophical mystics, the Sufis, and the Peripatetic and Illuminationist sages (ḥukamā). Davānī’s hermeneutic involved a reading of individual words and coded symbols as metaphorically representative of unstated realities, an approach that was similar to ‘the way of reading symbols in Persian literature from a Sufi perspective [found in] the Gulshan-i rāz of Maḥmūd Shabistarī (d. after 740/1340), a work doubtless known to Ḥāfiẓ as well as Davānī’. Sufi authorities such as ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt, Ḥallāj, Ibn Khafīf and Rūzbihān are invoked in the Sufi section of Davānī’s commentary. Throughout his commentary on Ḥāfiẓ, Ernst demonstrates that ‘Davānī maintains ... a consistent hermeneutic that assumes a deep structure of concealing and revealing the divine mysteries as the operative principle behind all serious literature. ... It was just as natural and inevitable to employ a Sufi hermeneutic for the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ as it was for Sa‘īd al-Dīn Farghānī (d. 701/1301), Ṣadr al-Dīn Qunawī (d. 752/1351), or ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1751) to write detailed mystical commentaries on the Arabic poems of Ibn al-Farid.’

  Part IV features four chapters on the topic of ‘Ḥāfiẓ’s Romantic Imagery and Language of Love’.

  In the first chapter on ‘The Allegory of Drunkenness and the Theophany of the Beloved in Sixteenth-Century Illustrations of Ḥāfiẓ’, eminent art-historian Michael Barry decodes the mystical symbolism underlying Ḥāfiẓ’s romantic imagery, as depicted in two famous Timurid-period illustrations of the Dīvān – featured respectively on the front and back cover of this volume. ‘Such paintings’, Barry reveals, ‘underscore how much traditional readers in the Iranian and Indo-Muslim worlds perceived Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān to be a pre-eminent allegory of Sufi love and mystical frenzy’. The artist’s visual exegesis of Ḥāfiẓ’s bacchanalian imagery – his depiction of the symbol of the tavern (kharābāt) – portrays the metaphysical drunkenness pervading all levels of Being, wine being a symbol for radiation of the Divine light and beauty – theophany – radiant within every atom of Existence. The Persian painter’s depiction of wine becomes ‘a metaphor for the all-connecting and all-pervading emanation of the divine creative clarity, from its most rarefied and immaterial heavenly configurations, to its densest and most visible embodiments on earth’, namely ‘the Divine Light’s descent (nuzūl) from the higher planes of Being to the lower: in the careful hierarchy of Islamicized neo-Platonic thought and imagery upon which Ḥāfiẓ so much plays in verse’. Lastly, the theme of the Sophianic Feminine in Persian miniature painting, with its many correspondences in Ḥāfiẓian love mysticism, is analysed, with Barry adducing convincing arguments that, just as with the Persian visual art of painting, ‘the mystical imagery of classical Persian Sufi epic – and lyrical – poetry thus can most definitely configure the Divine Belovéd as a female’.

  In the second of these chapters, entitled ‘Transfiguring Love: Perspective Shifts and the Contextualization of Experience in the Ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ’, James Morris attempts to recreate, and thus remind us, of the poet’s spiritual world view based on a perspective at once metaphysical, religious, aesthetic and ethical, where the entire creation is viewed as a theophany of the One divine Source. He focuses on the scriptural–symbolic correlates that are necessary to grasp the most essential spiritual realities in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry, which in turn reveal some of the basic rhetorical structures and presuppositions in his poetry. In order to illustrate these subjective shifts in perspective, Professor Morris analyses two ghazals, showing how the poet shifts line by line from the abstract to the particular, and from the general narrative to intimately personal voices in each verse, divine allusions (to Heart, Spirit and God) complementing the humanly individual work of understanding, a mental leap which the aesthetic of the ghazal demands of the reader.

  The last two chapters in the volume discuss Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry in relation to comparative literature: medieval European and Romantic English poetics respectively.

  Franklin Lewis’ study of ‘The Semiotic Horizons of Dawn in the Poetry of Ḥāfiẓ’ addresses the particular literary topos of dawn, the ‘Alba’, in Persian poetry in general, and in Ḥāfiẓ’s poems in particular. The chapter opens with a survey of this topos in the medieval Provençal lyric in southern France and northern Italy, showing how the theme of the parting of two lovers at dawn was ingrained into European literary traditions and suffused medieval European and renaissance literature. Lewis then reveals how a certain kind of Alba topos in early Arabic Andalusian poetry existed, which was similar but not identical to its Provençal prototype. In Persian, a kind of Alba theme is shown to appear in Sanā’ī’s ghazals. In the second half of his chapter, he examines Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals, to see if any of the criteria for the Alba genre can be found in them, but concludes to the negative: that the poet found the topos uninteresting or too clichéd to use. Nevertheless, making an inventory of Ḥāfiẓ’s lexicon of dawn, he underlines that nearly one-fifth of the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ explicitly refer to dawn or early morning, so that the topos of dawn is integral to his mythopoetic vocabulary.

  In her chapter on ‘Ḥāfiẓ and the Language of Love in Nineteenth-Century English and American Poetry’, Parvin Loloi surveys the reception history of Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry in English from the first translations into English verse by Sir William Jones in 1771 down to today. She summarizes the highlights, while underlining the drawbacks, in the versions done by nineteenth-century English and American translators, and some of the later renditions into English free-verse by the twentieth-century translators. As Loloi reveals, Von Hammer-Purgstall’s German translation (1812) of Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān had a huge impact on Goethe, Emerson and Tennyson in Europe and the USA, and played an important role, along with Orientalism, in revitalizing and renewing the literature and poetry of the Romantics. Likewise, through their readings of Sir William Jones, most of the English Romantics (Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Tennyson in particular) had a fairly advanced understanding of the love theory of classical Sufism; examples are adduced from their own works showing how the erotic content of their poetry is redolent of ‘the Ḥāfiẓian garden of love’. Other examples adduced by Loloi show how Shelley’s philosophy of Love, though steeped in neo-Plat
onism, also reflects his immersion in Jones’ translations of Ḥāfiẓ and writings on Persian mysticism, and his cognizance and versification of the doctrines of Sufism in his own work. It was in Tennyson’s poetry, however, that Ḥāfiẓ’s influence can be seen most forcefully among all the Romantics; the Sufi imagery frequent in Ḥāfiẓ appears prominently in Tennyson’s own poetry as well. In sum, we discover how widespread ‘the Ḥāfiẓian language of love’ has been in the work of both British and American poets throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the West.

  Acknowledgements

  The contents of the present volume are based on a conference on Hafiz and the School of Love in Classical Persian Poetry, convened in 2007 by the editor and James Morris at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS) of the University of Exeter, UK. Largely funded by the Iran Heritage Foundation (IHF), the conference was also supported by the University of Exeter and the British Academy. I am very grateful to Mr Farhad Hakimzadeh, former Director of the IHF, for his support of every aspect of this volume – from the conference’s initial conception to the book’s final publication. I would like to thank Professors Tim Niblock and Rashid El-Enany, both former directors of the IAIS, for their help in conference organization. I am also grateful to the excellent support staff at Exeter – Laura Scrivens, Catherine Bell and Jane Clark – for their organizational assistance during the convening of the conference. I am much obliged to Terry Graham’s kind hand in editing earlier drafts of my prose and to Jason Elliot’s eye in critically scanning my translations of Ḥāfiẓ’s verse in this volume.

  A Note on Transliteration

  Transliteration of Persian and Arabic words in this book follows the transliteration table of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, except for the letter ‘ż’ (zad) which is rendered as ‘ḍ’ (as in Arabic). Persian words of Arabic origin, such as Dīwān, generally, but not exclusively, use ‘w’ instead of ‘v’ for the Arabic letter wa. The diphthongs are consistently rendered as ‘aw’ and ‘ay’.

  Leonard Lewisohn, 13 August 2009

  Notes

  1 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 47: 8.

  2 See, in particular, her The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. Also, cf. J. Vyvyan, Shakespeare and the Rose of Love: A Study of the Early Plays in Relation to the Medieval Philosophy of Love.

  3 See Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, pp. 18–61.

  4 The best study of Ficino and Shakespeare remains Jill Line, Shakespeare and the Fire of Love.

  PART I

  ḤĀFIẒ IN THE SOCIO-HISTORICAL, LITERARY AND MYSTICAL MILIEU OF MEDIEVAL PERSIA

  Prolegomenon to the Study of Ḥāfiẓ

  1 – Socio-historical and Literary Contexts: Ḥāfiẓ in Shīrāz

  Leonard Lewisohn

  Cité de l’amour

  When Ḥāfiẓ was born in the city of Shīrāz some time between 710/1310 and 720/1320,1 the cultural epoch into which our poet stepped was one of the richest in all human history. As the second leading cultural capital (after Tabriz) of medieval Persia, the artistic, intellectual and literary brilliance of fourteenth-century Shīrāz under Muẓaffarid rule is perhaps best comparable to fifteenth-century Florence under Cosimo and Lorenzo de Medici. The poets and philosophers who thrived in this intellectual centre of south-western Fars easily rival the likes of Marsilio Ficino, Botticelli, Michelangelo and Pico de Mirandelo, who were to fill the capital city of Italian Tuscany a century later. For several centuries, throughout all the domains of the Islamic world, Shīrāz had been renowned as House of Knowledge (dār al-‘ilm),2 the city vaunting its learned theologians, eloquent preachers, pious ascetics, ecstatic Sufis, erudite scholars, specialist theologians, great calligraphers, famous scientists and adept hommes de lettres. Many of the natives of the city still figure as the central pillars of classical Islamic civilization. Shaykh Rūzbihān Baqlī (d. 606/1210), one of the greatest exponents of paradoxical expression and certainly the most original author of works on Sufi erotic theology, had flourished there a century before Ḥāfiẓ. Sa‘dī of Shīrāz, the greatest romantic and humanist poet in the Persian language, had died in 691/1292, less than a generation before Ḥāfiẓ’s birth, while the Illuminationist (Ishrāqī) philosopher Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī (d. 710/1311), author of the encyclopaediac work Durrat al-tāj li-ghurrat al-Dubāj, had walked its streets a few years before he was born.

  This city of ‘Saints and Poets’, as Arthur Arberry called it,3 was especially famous for its colleges and seminaries, its Sufi centres (khānaqāhs) and mosques, many of which had large accompanying gardens and possessed properties attached by charitable bequest to their grounds. The presence of these institutions, even if their administrators were often than not corrupt,4 lent the town a peculiar sacred ambience in the popular imagination. In Shīrāz – claimed the fourteenth-century Morrocan world traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who visited the city during Ḥāfiẓ’s life – the Qur’ān is chanted more beautifully than anywhere else in the Muslim world. The city was also like Florence in being both hotly decadent and a hotbed of religious fervour,5 with prayer assemblies, Qur’ān study classes, Sufi séances for samā‘, lecture halls full of preachers calling the populace to repent their sins, recluses and ascetics (zuhhād) down every corner and alley,6 vignettes of which appear everywhere in Ḥāfiẓ’s verse.

  The city also prided itself on vast cemeteries with mausoleums of its saints. ‘In Shīrāz one thousand Sufi masters and saints or more are found’, boasted Sa‘dī in a poem describing the city in the thirteenth century, ‘around whose head the Ka‘ba continuously circumambulates’.7 The most interesting work on Shīrāz’s necropolis was a work penned by Junayd-i Shīrāzī in Ḥāfiẓ’s lifetime called The Thousand Mausoleums, a guidebook landmarking all the important tombs as sites of visitation for travellers, adding in as an extra feature a backdrop account of the city’s famous quarters.8 This work provided a veritable tourist guide to the sacred sites and shrines of Shīrāz,9 and for visitors who flocked there from all over Islamdom gave ‘the impression that the whole of Shīrāz consisted of pious Sunnis’.10 Among these holy sites, the tomb of the Sufi master Ibn Khafīf of Shīrāz (d. 371/982), renowned for his ascetic prowess, was the most popular spot of weekend visitation for the populace of the city, second only to Shāh Chirāgh, the tomb of Aḥmad ibn Mūsā, brother of the Shi‘ite Imām ‘Alī al-Riḍā, slain in 220/835.11 Ibn Baṭṭūṭa describes how Tāsh Khātun, the mother of Sulṭān Abū Isḥāq Īnjū (reg. 743/1343–753/1353: the ruler of Shīrāz when Ḥāfiẓ was a youth), paid homage to ‘the Imām, the Pole, the Saint, Abū ‘Abdu’llāh Ibn Khafīf, known to them as the Shaikh, ensampler of the whole land of Fars and much reverenced by them, so that they come to his tomb morning and evening to seek a blessing. The Khātun visits the mosque every Thursday night; there is an oratory and a madrasa, where the judges and scholars gather as they do at the shrine of Aḥmad ibn Mūsā.’12 The abundance of Sufi shrines and centres (khānaqāhs) in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Shīrāz made the city renowned as the ‘Citadel of Saints’ (burj al-awliyā’).13

  Ibn Baṭṭūṭa also recounted ‘the strange custom’ of seeing thousands of women fanning themselves cool in the sultry summer heat, who crowded on Monday, Thursday and Friday afternoons onto the balconies of the Ancient Mosque listening to famous preachers discourse.14 ‘I have never seen in any land so great an assembly of women’,15 he exclaimed, stunned by their sight. Aside from the beauties of the fair sex in Shīrāz (with vignettes of whom Ḥāfiẓ’s verse abounds), the city was fabled for its vast bazaar (Ibn Baṭṭūṭa thought it more sumptuous than that in Damascus),16 divided into sections by guild (an alleyway for fruit sellers, another corridor for goldsmiths, for cloth merchants, etc.). Shīrāz’s gardens were full of fountains, their rills lined by fragrant orange trees and elegant cypresses: gardens so beautiful that they retained their reputation as a byword for lovely pleasances down to the ninetee
nth-century when the Romantic poets – Goethe and Schiller in Germany; Shelley, Keats and Tennyson in England; and later in the early twentieth century the modernist poet Rilke – indued their verse with the scent of the roses and sound of the songs of nightingales echoing through Shīrāz’s meadows and gardens. Its large parks, fountains and gardens, imposing palaces, pleasances and promenades, gracious brothels (bayt al-luṭf) and many taverns (kharābāt) were all celebrated by all its great Persian poets. Ḥāfiẓ sang:

  What delight Shīrāz is! How peerless

  Her site and circumstance. Do not let her,

  O God, decline and fall from grace.

  ... Come to Shīrāz, entreat for grace

  Of the Spiritus Dei from her men

  Of letters there, versed in the sciences.17

  And yet, while Ḥāfiẓ did mention the city of Shīrāz and its human and natural beauties frequently in his poetry, the poet’s ‘real’ world lay elsewhere: this terrestrial topography was but a pretext to celebrate and an allegory to catechize his reader about the wonders of Love’s metropolis. Ḥāfiẓ’s real habitation was the Cité de l’amour, of which he claimed to be an eternal denizen, his beloved Shīrāz but its temporal place and local habitation on earth.18 Ḥāfiẓ’s eleven references to the city of Shīrāz in his Dīvān, far from being literal descriptions of its local place and habitation, as much depict the topography of the mundus imaginalis of this cosmopolis of Eros as figure as actual references to the city’s bordellos, pleasances, gardens and taverns. These references are not simply to a fun-loving ‘city full of love and erotic pleasures’, as certain historians’ imaginations fancifully project,19 for in nearly all these references words such as ‘love’ (‘ishq) or beauty (ḥusn) hover amid the surrounding lines, encasing, in some cases replacing, the city’s physical geography with Love’s supra-terrestrial utopia and ambience.20 This romanticization of urban centres was an integral aesthetic dimension of the Persian love-lyric – ghazal – itself, found in many major classical Persian poets.21 Thus, Khāqānī vaunted ‘Here and in Damascus is the scale of Love [dimashq-i ‘āshiqī]. Of Damascus cease to boast for love’s a scale without need of gold’,22 and Rūmī celebrated the ‘Damascus of Love’ (dimashq-i ‘ishq),23 and Kamāl Khujandī boasted that Tabrīz is ‘but half a league’ away from Paradise,24 just as ‘Ubayd Zākānī, praising Shīrāz during the 1340s, extolled how ‘By the fortune of the justice of the king [Abu Isḥāq Īnjū, reg. 743/1342–753/ 1353] who cares for the poor, the environs of Shīrāz are paradise on earth’.25 Similarly, in Ḥāfiẓ’s lyrics his physical birthplace melded into a metaphysical paradise of love: