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

  The above overview of some of the major and minor poets contemporary with Ḥāfiẓ in fourteenth-century Persia only gives a very superficial indication of the immense richness of the Persian poetic tradition in which he was steeped. Scholars have long known the fact that many of Ḥāfiẓ’s lyrics were composed in imitation of the metrical and rhyming schemes of previous ghazal writers in a time-honoured tradition. The entire Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ constitutes an intratextual commentary on the lyrical tradition present in Persia since the eleventh century, which is why in many editions of Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān several pages of introduction are devoted to tracing the verses that he appropriated from previous poets, then recast and reused in his own poetry, a phenomenon which has been the subject of a number of long scholarly essays.75

  Connoisseurship of Poetry in the Age of Ḥāfiẓ

  The audience who listened to the recitation of Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals were some of the most formidably educated and exactingly cultured men that Persians have ever been. When he recited or sung his poems – and ‘Ḥāfiẓ’ today is still a term used for a singer and bard76 – to this intellectual nobility, he knew quite well that they were all supreme connoisseurs of verse. Many of his listeners were poets themselves who would have known by heart many ghazals by his famous forebears (‘Aṭṭār, Rūmī, ‘Irāqī, Sa‘dī...) and illustrious contemporaries (Salmān, Khwājū, Kamāl Khujandī...). In catering to that elite, supersophisticated circle of specialists, Ḥāfiẓ’s success lay in how skilfully he could paraphrase, imitate, reply to and so hopefully excel those poets by his original manipulation of the same raw materials – images, symbols, ideas, metres and rhymes – that they had employed. Most of the ghazals and qaṣīdas written in the Age of Ḥāfiẓ were composed within this grand intertextual tradition of classical Persian poetry, in which the ‘modern’ poets would attempt to outdo ‘classical’ poets by ‘replying to’ (javāb-gū’ī), or ‘welcoming’ (istiqbāl) or ‘following’ (tatabbu‘) their poems.77 Verse-collecting, memorization of classical poetry was, has been, and probably always will be the chief natural cultural obsession in Persianate societies.78 This craze certainly characterized Timurid Iran.79 No matter how provincial their courts, nearly all of the Timurid princes in Mongol and Timurid Iran composed Dīvāns of poetry. Those who did not themselves versify were good connoisseurs of verse, and the Timurid period ‘was not only full of poets, artists and scholars, but should be accounted in some respects as one of the most glorious periods of science and art’.80 In Ḥāfiẓ’s day all the Timurid princes vyed with one another in attracting would-be poet-laureates to their courts.81 Unless the pitch and splendour of Ḥāfiẓ’s lines could transcend the fortissimo eloquence of the likes of Sa‘dī and Kamāl, unless he could articulate with greater epigrammatic precision and express in ways more fierce and overreaching the esoteric vision and spiritual values of Sufi poets such as ‘Aṭṭār and Khwājū, the faculties of eyes and ears of these expert connoisseurs would cease to be amazed and he would suffer loss of princely patronage. Of course, this never happened to Ḥāfiẓ. Quite the opposite in fact, as he boasts:

  Once Love became my tutor in the art

  Of fine speech, all my words became

  Key postulates of debate in every coterie.82

  If by basking in the luminescence of this resplendent firmament of Persian poets, Ḥāfiẓ’s verse was indeed indued with lustre, the scintilla of their starry rhyme and verse has since largely been eclipsed by the Venusian fireball of his own Dīvān. In fact, not only is Ḥāfiẓ today considered to be the fairest of stars, last in the train of night in that heavenly company, he inhabits a sphere of his own before whom all other poets – those who wrote in the ghazal genre at least – sit mantled like chandeliers drowned in floodlighting.83 In Shīrāz’s citadel of saints he ranks as the greatest poet – save perhaps Sa‘dī.84 Ḥāfiẓ is not only the supreme Persian poet of the fourteenth century, but above and beyond that, as one scholar recently put it, he has come to be considered as the veritable ‘spokesman of the Collective Unconscious of the entire Persian race...’85:

  After Firdawsī and Rūmī, Ḥāfiẓ is our third national poet. Whereas our national heroic poem epitomizing the mythological history of the Persians can be found in Firdawsī’s Book of Kings, and Rūmī’s Mathnawī and Dīvān-i Kabīr [Shams] represent the national poetic chronicle of the Persian Sufi tradition, Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān constitutes Persia’s national lyrical epic, expressive of the Persian people’s refined wit, beauty, satire, joy and struggle for social reformation.86

  Collation and Commentaries on the Dīvān Beyond Persia’s Borders

  It wasn’t until a little over a century following his death that Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān underwent a critical compilation87 under the tutelage of Prince Farīdun, b. Ḥusayn Bayqarā (d. 915/1509), who collected over 500 manuscripts scattered across cities throughout Islamdom at his court and ordered the formal collation of the Dīvān, which has since been passed down in the alphabetical form (arranged by end-rhyme) known to us today.88 In one of the manuscripts from this collection written by a scribe named Shihāb al-Dīn ‘Abdu’llāh Murvārīd, we find the epithet ‘Tongue of the Invisible’ (Lisān al-ghayb) attached to the poet’s name for the first time.89

  The first compiler of the Dīvān was a friend of Ḥāfiẓ who lived in Shīrāz under the reign of Sulṭān Abū’l-Fatḥ Ibrāhīm (reg. 817–38/1414–34), named Muḥammad Gulandām.90 In his short introduction to this compilation, in one of the few utterly authentic historical accounts of the poet, Gulandām informs that Ḥāfiẓ’s verse was internationally celebrated during his lifetime:91

  It took but a very short time for the literary empire over which his ghazals reigned to stretch from the outermost borders of Khurāsān up into Turkistān and down into India. It took but a brief instant for the convoys of his enchanting speech to reach the outskirts of the lands of Iraq and Azerbayjan. The musical séances of the Sufis [samā‘-i ṣūfiyān] without his passionate poems soon came to lack warmth; likewise, unless graced by his tasteful speech the convivial banquets of kings were devoid of all relish, savour and enjoyment.92

  From Gulandām’s assertion it is clear that there is as much truth as hyperbole in Ḥāfiẓ’s boasts:

  This itinerant Persian verse

  sent errant on Bengal ways

  is delicious and rich enough

  for Indian parrots to crunch

  its luscious, sugary chunks.93

  Or:

  Those Samarqandī Turks

  and black-eyed girls of Kashmir

  All dance and flaunt their charms

  to Ḥāfiẓ of Shīrāz’s verse.94

  If his poetry was legendary during his own lifetime, after his death the interpretative tradition of the Ḥāfiẓian heritage expanded vastly, mostly preserved outside the lands of Greater Persia, particularly in Ottoman Turkey95 and Mughal India, where the most important and largest amount of commentaries on his Dīvān were written. The best known of these are the mystical commentaries in Turkish by Surūrī (d. 969/1561) and Sham‘ī (d. 1000/1591). There was also the sober literary and grammatical commentary by Sūdī of Bosnia (d. 1006/1597) that was composed in Istanbul,96 which formed the basis for most European interpretation of the poet.97 But it says a lot about the still underdeveloped state of Ḥāfiẓ Studies today that while far more commentaries on the Dīvān were written in India than in Iran, Central Asia or Turkey, not a single one of these Indian commentaries has to date been published.98 An exception to this rule is ‘the clearest, best and most revealing of all ancient and modern commentaries in solving the difficulties in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry’;99 that is, the commentary on Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān written in India circa 1026/1617 by Abū’l-Ḥasan ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Khatmī Lāhūrī, only first edited and published in 1995. For fathoming the theosophical background and mystical subtleties of Ḥāfiẓ’s esoteric language and theory of love, Lāhūrī’s monumental work (over 4,000 pages of small print) is comp
arable in its significance to Muḥammad Lāhījī’s (d. 912/1507) inimitable Persian commentary on Shabistarī’s Gulshan-i rāz100 or Ismā‘īl Anqaravī’s (d. 1041/1631) grand Turkish exegesis of Rūmī’s Mathnawī.101

  While the oldest Ḥāfiẓ manuscripts were preserved in the fifteenth-century courts of Timurid Persia and Central Asia and amongst the Mughals in India, the earliest printed edition of Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān appeared under the imprint of the East India Company in Calcutta in 1791. Over the course of the nineteenth century several more editions were published in India.102 Lithograph editions of Ḥāfiẓ began to appear in Persia during the mid-nineteenth century, but it was not until 1941 that the first major critical edition of Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān (compiled by Muḥammad Qazvīnī and Qāsim Ghanī) was published, followed by a plethora of other scholarly editions. Seven or eight quite reputable scholarly editions today can be bought.103 One of the best of these, to which most of the contributors to this volume have referred, is that compiled by Parvīz Nātil Khānlarī, containing 486 ghazals. Despite certain shortcomings,104 Khānlarī’s work remains still one of the best critical editions in print,105 and recently has been used as the basis for translations of the entire Dīvān into French (by Charles de Fouchécour) and English (by Peter Avery).

  Not once during the past 600 years has Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān been off the top-ten Persian ‘best-seller’ list. Today, no self-respecting Afghan or Persian’s personal library shelf lacks a copy of Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān.106 Universities in Iran have recently inaugurated a separate subfield of Persian literary criticism, known as ‘Ḥāfiẓology’ (Ḥāfiẓ-shināsī).107 Modernist intellectuals, progressive Sufis and philosophers foolhardy enough to attempt to criticize Ḥāfiẓ from the standpoint of his morality, or mysticism, or politics, or poetry, or religion, or philosophy, or whatever, always seem to end up wringing their hands in remorse as they watch their clever carping immediately result in the plummeting of their own reputations. Inevitably, before the undying cult of Ḥāfiẓ’s popularity, all other poets’ names crouch in the shadow.108 It would seem that due to the exceptionally high calibre of his poetry, the wise in heart only confirm their own folly and mediocrity by daring to quibble with his pronouncements:109

  You writers who write such bad poems, why

  Do you envy Ḥāfiẓ so much? His grace of speech

  That people love comes entirely from God.110

  Beyond this undisputable conquest of his readers’ heart and minds, what is perhaps even remarkable is that even though Ḥāfiẓ belongs squarely within the classical tradition of medieval Persian literature, to date no ‘modern’ poet has managed to compose poetry more avant-garde than his verse, nor even faintly rival his popularity in the marketplace of belles lettres.111 As Khurramshāhī so aptly put it:

  On the one hand, Ḥāfiẓ appropriated for himself the quintessence of previous classical Arabic and Persian poetry and, on the other hand, he laid the weightiest burden of obligation upon all later Persian poetry. Even though today we have come along and totally changed the style and form of poetry, our modernist Persian poetry still remains all deeply affected by and in debt to Ḥāfiẓ. For instance, the ‘Indian Style’ [sabk-i hindī] of writing poetry is clearly visible in modernist poetry but in a slightly less glaring manner, as can be seen in the poems of modernist masters such as Amīrī Fīrūzkūhī [d. 1363/1984] and Shahriyār [d. 1367/1988], Nūdhar Parang [d. 1385/2006] and Sīyih – and yet all of them write in the style of Ḥāfiẓ.112 ... I sometimes think that the world of the poetry of modernist poets such as Suhrāb Sihpihrī [d. 1359/1980] and Furūkh Farrukhzād [d. 1345/1966] is not any more intimate and near to us than the world of Ḥāfiẓ. The reason for this is that Ḥāfiẓ is concerned with supraliterary issues of enduring relevance, which are neither exotic, hackneyed clichés, nor expressed in a language alien to the contemporary mind.113

  While the amount of studies devoted to Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals printed in Persian annually is only about a tenth of the amount of scholarship produced on Shakespeare’s sonnets each year,114 it is certainly blossoming. In the late 1990s a Centre for Ḥāfiẓ Studies in Shīrāz (Markaz-i Ḥāfiẓ-shināsī), currently publishing its own Ḥāfiẓ Research Review (Ḥāfiẓ-pazūhishī), was launched.115 Ḥāfiẓ bibliographies,116 dictionaries, treasuries of his poetic terminology, learned articles on him in Persian specialist literary journals, not to mention countless monographs on Ḥāfiẓ and music,117 Ḥāfiẓ and astrology, Ḥāfiẓ and philosophy... appear in print on an annual basis in Persian-speaking lands. For the Shīrāzī sage, the season’s difference and the penalty of man is never felt in any time or place. And the reason for this lies in the Ḥāfiẓocentric nature of classical Persianate civilization.

  The Ḥāfiẓocentricism of Persianate Civilization, and the Qur’ān

  Scholars such as Louis Massignon and Paul Nywia have demonstrated how the religious conscience of Islam as well as its two main liturgical languages – Arabic and Persian – has been nurtured and shaped by the Qur’ān.118 Although it is well known that it was customary in all medieval Islamic societies for children first to memorize the Qur’ān before pursuing other studies, students of Islam must here be reminded of a lesser-known but equally important literary truth, namely that all the Persianate civilizations of Islamdom (Ottoman Turkey, Safavid and Qajar Persia, Timurid Central Asia and Mughal India...) have for the past five centuries been ‘Ḥāfiẓocentric’ as well.119 Up to the 1950s, Muslim children in Iran and Afghanistan and India were taught first to memorize the Qur’ān, and secondly to commit the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ to heart, thus absorbing in their grammar-school curriculum the sacred and revealed book of Islam alongside the verses of the inspired ‘Tongue of the Invisible’. From Istanbul to Lahore, from the Persian Gulf to thithermost Transoxiania, for some five centuries the ‘Book’ of Islam – the Qur’ān – has in this fashion shared pride of place beside Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān, a situation comparable to that which prevailed between the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare during the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries in England and the United States.120 Perhaps for this reason it is that, after the Qur’ān, the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ has been canonized as chief among three books of poetry used in Persianate societies for the purposes of divination (tafā’ul).121

  ‘Ḥāfiẓ’, nom de plume of Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad of Shīrāz, literally denotes one who is a ‘Memorizer of the Qur’ān’. To speak of ‘Ḥāfiẓ’ is necessarily to speak of the Qur’ān,122 and that he knew the sacred scripture by heart is apparent from a number of verses, for example:

  I swear, Ḥāfiẓ, by that Qur’ān you have by heart,

  I’ve found no poetry that’s as sweet as yours.123

  This testimony that his own poetry was intricately connected with his own absorption and reading and recitation of the Holy Scripture124 is borne out by several other verses, where it is apparent that Ḥāfiẓ engaged in the contemplative discipline125 of recitation of the Qur’ān at night:

  Oh Ḥāfiẓ in the darkness of poverty and in

  The solitude of the night, as long as you can sing

  And study the Qur’ān, do not sink into sadness.126

  Ḥāfiẓ’s teacher Qiwām al-Dīn ‘Abdu’llāh,127 who excelled in all fields of Islamic knowledge that were current in the age, typically would hold his classes in theology during the last third of the night, and at dawntide begin his lessons in the Qur’ān.128 Ḥāfiẓ speaks of these midnight-to-dawn sessions of study in many verses:

  To rise at dawn and seek what’s sound

  And wholesome as Ḥāfiẓ has done –

  All I’ve done has come from the grace

  And embras de richesse of the Qur’ān.129

  Other verses of the Dīvān testify to Ḥāfiẓ’s breadth of erudition in a variety of interpretations of Qur’ānic passages, particularly his understanding of the science of esoteric commentary on the Qur’ān.130 Writing about a century after his death, Dawlats
hāh claimed that ‘Ḥāfiẓ had no peer in Qur’ānology. In both the esoteric and exoteric sciences he was a treasury of spiritual truths and mysteries.’131 Perhaps the most famous of Ḥāfiẓ’s statements about the Qur’ān, which contrasts his inspired breviary of mystical Eros with the formulary litany of Islam’s sacred scripture, is this verse:

  Eros come to your rescue, even if you,

  Like Ḥāfiẓ, can chant the Qur’ān by heart

  In all its fourteen different lections.132

  Taking a cue from this verse, a contemporary Ḥāfiẓ scholar entitled a collection of his essays on the poet ‘The Fourteen Lections’.133 The term ‘fourteen different lections’ encompasses some 1,100 or so instances, whether minor or major, in the Qur’ān, which can generate different readings of particular verses.134 These variant lections (called Qirā’a in Arabic) were based on textual variants promulgated by the seven earliest recognized ‘readers’ of the second/eighth century, above and beyond the recension of the Qur’ān made by the Caliph ‘Uthmān in 30/650, which was the first codified ‘orthodox’ text of the Muslim scripture; to these were later added seven other ‘readers’, from whence the expression the ‘fourteen lections’ arose.135 By placing a vowel sign or a dot over or under an Arabic letter in a different place, significant variations in the reading and understanding of such passages occur. In this verse, Ḥāfiẓ thus announces his erudition in being able to recite by heart all the textual variants – both in sense and recitation, fourteen in all – and the different possible readings which the consonantal Arabic text of the Qur’ān in diverse instances affords. His extraordinary powers of memorization, even rare among skilled theologians specializing in Qur’ān studies, no doubt would have caused his contemporaries to marvel.136