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

  His absorption in Islam’s holy scripture is also repeated in the preface to the Dīvān composed by his friend Muḥammad Gulandām, who tells us that the poet devoted much of his free time to ‘diligent study of the Qur’ān’ and ‘annotation of the Kashshāf’137 – a fact to which Ḥāfiẓ attests in another verse:

  No reciter of scripture who stands in the miḥrāb

  Of the Firmament has ever enjoyed such delight

  As I have received from the wealth of the Qur’ān.138

  Just as scholars have spoken of the ‘Qur’ānization of the memory’ in Islamic intellectual traditions, a similar phenomenon appeared in late classical Persianate civilization. In lands where Persian is spoken the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ has for centuries been canonized as a miraculous scripture; few critics today would probably disagree with Jāmī’s view in the Bahāristān that ‘some of his poems are downright miraculous’.139 Ḥāfiẓ possesses a quality that only a handful of sacred texts and scriptures – the sayings of Lao Tzu or the I Ching in this respect come to mind – possess, which is that the intellectual veracity of his verse transcends the century of its composition. For Persian-speakers, his poems remain a sort of trans-sectarian, atemporal sacred text, a hallowed scripture venerated by Muslims, Christians and Jews in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and all throughout Central Asia, and by Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists in India, not to mention admired by atheists and secular nationalists everywhere. ‘Setting the matter of religion to the side’, pronounced Mu‘īn, ‘to Persian-speakers the words of Ḥāfiẓ are considered to be as hallowed as any heavenly scripture of lofty spiritual rank. His Dīvān is one of the important pillars of Persian language, which till Doomsday will remain everlastingly immune from ruin and decline.’140

  Ḥāfiẓ’s Life and Times

  Next to nothing is known about Ḥāfiẓ’s adolescence, education and family.141 We know that Ḥāfiẓ came from a well-to-do family, since the epithet Khwāja (Esquire) attached to his name (Khwāja Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ) was reserved for members of the nobility and gentility.142 Nonetheless, we know nothing of his family, or their origins; even the name of his father is unknown.143 Nearly everything we do know about the poet has been largely construed by later hagiographical accounts or by modern scholars reading political references into his Dīvān by hindsight. ‘The attempt to write a conventional modern biography of a medieval poet like Hafez or Ferdowsi, in the form of a bildungsroman constructed out of ascertainable facts’, Khurramshahī underlines, ‘is itself an anachronistic venture. Modern biographies of modern poets, based on myriads of external sources and first-hand accounts, or even their own diaries and letters, may deepen our understanding of their poems. But to reverse the process and attempt to conjure up biographical details by over-literal interpretation of highly polished and traditional medieval poems is to pursue a chimera.’144 Aside from a few poems which mention some of the famous figures who lived during his lifetime, which permit one to estimate approximately their date of composition, the Dīvān does not really provide enough material to formulate a biography of the poet.145

  From the references that exist in his Dīvān (as pointed out above) and his pen-name, it is clear that in addition to having the text of the Qur’ān by heart, he excelled in the sciences of Qur’ān commentary (tafsīr) and recitation (talawwut). Dāryūsh Āshūrī’s intertextual study demonstrated beyond all doubt that Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals are replete with the imagery, ideas, religious mythology and Sufi terminology taken directly from Maybudī’s grand Qur’ān commentary.146 From the numerous references to his ‘forty’ years of study147 and ‘the porch and arch of seminary college’ (madrasa) and ‘the numbing hum empty chatter of debate’,148 we know that he specialized in theology when he was a student. The theological texts that he studied in the beginning of the fourteenth century, some of which are mentioned by Gulandām, were the supreme classics of the period.149 Being a member of the guild of the ‘men of learning’ (ahl-i ‘ilm), throughout his adult life the poet evidently received a regular government stipend (waẓīfa) for his teaching and other professorial duties.150 As can be seen in certain ghazals, he was also steeped in the teachings of the ‘Greatest Master’ Muḥyī al-Dīn ibn al-‘Arabī (d. 638/1240),151 and he both imitated the poetry152 and versified the ideas of the Akbarian treatises of his latter-day followers such as Fakhr al-Dīn ‘Irāqī (d. 1273).153

  An extant manuscript penned by him proves him to have been a fine calligrapher.154 Shīrāz was full of world-famous professors of theology and masters of Sufism, many of whom Ḥāfiẓ no doubt would have studied under in the first half of the fourteenth century.155 One of these was his own teacher Qiwām al-Dīn ‘Abdu’llāh, renowned for his austere piety and stern opposition to rationalist philosophy.156

  All the fond fantasies and speculations about the women in Ḥāfiẓ’s life – wives, mistresses, girlfriends, harlots – spun in later centuries by the writers of historical romances known as tadhkiras (‘memoirs’ [of poets, scholars, Sufis...]) cannot be verified by any contemporary chronicle. No historical records contemporary to him survive that would furnish any details about the women and loves of his life.157 Anyway, as was noted so long ago, ‘such domestic particulars [are not] to be expected from Persian biographers in view of their reticence on all matrimonial matters’,158 although some eminent scholars still persist in asserting, for example, that the following line alludes in fact to his wife’s death:

  That friend whose presence made my house

  Seem a faery kingdom – of all faults she was free,

  Herself of faery substance head to toe.159

  Yet ‘there is nothing in the poem to show that his wife is the person referred to’, as Browne points out.160 There are other lines in his Dīvān where he alludes apparently to the death of a son; other ghazals seem to indicate that he had several children.161

  We are fortunate in having a preface to the Dīvān, the authenticity of which is accepted by scholars today,162 written by a close personal friend of the poet named Muḥammad Gulandām, who admired and collected his poems when Ḥāfiẓ could not be bothered to do so. The poet’s preoccupation with theology, as well as the intellectual milieu and princely circles in which he moved, are there depicted vividly:

  However, diligent study of the Qur’ān, constant attendance to the King’s business, the annotation of the Kashshāf163 and the Miṣbāḥ,164 the perusal of the Maṭālī,165 and the Mifṭāḥ,166 the acquisition of canons of literary criticism and the appreciation of Arabic poems prevented him from collecting his verses and odes, or editing and arranging his poems. The writer of these lines, this least of men, Muḥammad Gulandām, when he was attending the lectures of our Master, that most eminent teacher Qiwāmu’d-Dīn ‘Abdu’llāh, used constantly and repeatedly to urge, in the course of conversation, that he [Ḥāfiẓ] should gather together all these rare gems in one concatenation and assemble all these lustrous pearls on one string, so that they might become a necklace of great price for his contemporaries or a girdle for the brides of his time. With this request, however, he was unable to comply, alleging lack of appreciation on the part of his contemporaries as an excuse, until he bade farewell to this life ... in A.H. 791 (A.D. 1389).167

  Ḥāfiẓ in the Courtly Milieu of Shīrāz

  As a result of a number of studies over the course of the twentieth century by scholars such as Qāsim Ghanī, Muḥammad Mu‘īn, Roger Lescot, Hellmut Ritter and ‘Abd al-Ḥusayn Zarrīnkūb on Ḥāfiẓ’s relationship to the political elite and princes of Shīrāz,168 individual verses and sometimes entire ghazals have now been identified (with various degrees of certainty) as having been penned as occasional lyrics – sometimes panegryrics – to princes or noblemen, or directly prompted by political events. Since so many works already exist in both Persian or European languages with excellent accounts of the little we know of Ḥāfiẓ’s mundane life, this prosaic socio-political context of his verse shall not be my focus here, so only a sho
rt summary will be offered.

  Literary historians agree that many of Ḥāfiẓ’s poems were occasional verse, the provenance of which can probably be traced back to the political vicissitudes and fluctuating fortunes of the last prince of the Īnjū dynasty and the succeeding Muẓaffarid rulers of Shīrāz, whose names and reigns are as follows:

  Īnjū’id Dynasty

  1. Abū Isḥāq Īnjū (reg. 743/1343–753/1353)

  Muẓaffarid Dynasty

  2. Amīr Mubariz al-Dīn Muḥammad Muẓaffarī (reg. 754/1353–759/1357)

  3. Shāh Shujā‘ Muẓaffarī (reg. 759/1358–786/1384)

  4. Zayn al-‘Ābidīn (son of Shāh Shujā‘) (reg. 786/1384–789/1387). Tīmūr visits Shīrāz in 789/1387 just before Zayn al-‘Ābidīn is deposed

  5. Shāh Yaḥyā’s short six-month reign (in 789/1387)

  6. Shāh Manṣūr b. Shāh Muẓaffarī (cousin of Shāh Shujā‘) (reg. 791/1388–795/1392)169

  Abū Isḥāq Īnjū was recognized as a ‘tolerant and artistically minded prince’170 and a ‘generous patron of poetry’.171 Religious tolerance and patronage of the arts were the hallmarks of his rule.172 From all over Persia, poets thronged at his court, sowing the seeds of their panegyrical praise in the receptive earth of his adulation-loving ears.173 A poetaster himself, he was a good connoisseur of the many poets who sought fame and fortune at his court. These included the sharpest poetic wits of the age, such as Khwājū Kirmānī, who dedicated two of his mathnawī poems (Kamāl-nāma and Rawḍāt al-anwār), several qaṣīdas and a strophe poem (tarkīb-band) to him,174 and ‘Ubayd Zākānī, who composed several panegyrics in his praise.175 Abū Isḥāq was also ‘one of the most beloved of princes whom Ḥāfiẓ praised’, to whom quite a few of Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals (as panegyrics) are explicitly addressed.176 Ḥāfiẓ wrote a qaṣīda of 44 couplets in praise of Abū Isḥāq.177 Some scholars speculate, for instance, that some of the verses from the following ghazal were composed to bewail the passing of Abū Isḥāq’s convivial and pleasure-loving court and reign:

  Friendship and camaraderie in men have fled

  And can’t be found in anyone. O what’s happened

  To kith and friends? When did comradeship

  And fellowship conclude? Where has gone friendship?

  The aqua vitae’s turned foul, overcast and dun;

  The man in green whose coming was so blissful, gone;

  What’s happened to the vernal wind and Aries’ fan?178

  Whatever its political background, whether or not this ghazal was composed by Ḥāfiẓ as a memento of Abū Isḥāq’s benevolent reign during the five-year police state of Mubāriz al-Dīn Muẓaffarī, who was ‘orthodox, harsh, and not inclined to spare human life’179 – as Ghanī insists on arguing180 – by reducing its inspiration down to the lowest common temporal denominator, dating its provenance by decade or by year, the actual meaning of the poem is not thereby greatly elucidated. In any case, scholars are far from united in agreeing about the political circumstances that occasioned any of Ḥāfiẓ’s poems.181

  Prove if one could that Prince X was the poet’s ‘beloved’, one can certainly more commonsensically extrapolate the meaning of Ḥāfiẓ’s lament in the above poem to be a kind of contrapuntal analogue in verse cast in the same mould as the Duke’s quip in prose to Escalus in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, that ‘there is so great a fever on goodness that the dissolution of it must cure it. Novelty is only in request, and it is dangerous to be aged in any kind of course as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships accursed. Much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world. This news is old enough, yet it is every day’s news.’182 Furthermore, if conquests of provinces, bequests of patrons and boons of princes be all put to one side, Ḥāfiẓ’s plaint in this poem is situated squarely within the Sufi literary genre dedicated to expounding the topos of the ‘unhappy decay of true Piety and the Immoralities of the Age we live in’,183 identical to highly similar sentiments expressed two centuries earlier by ‘Aṭṭār in his Memoir of the Saints, for instance.184 The entire ghazal is thus best understood, I think, as a complaint against the general decadence of the times, in exactly the same vein as W.B. Yeats’ stanza:

  All neighbourly content and easy talk are gone,

  But there is no good complaining, for money’s rant is on.

  He that’s mounting up must on his neighbour mount,

  And we and all the Muses are things of no account.185

  One of the main patrons of Ḥāfiẓ was Abū Isḥāq’s multimillionaire vizier ‘Imād al-Dīn Ḥasan (‘Ḥajjī’) Qiwām al-Dīn (d. 754/1353), whose extravagant convivial gatherings and generosity the poet celebrated. ‘The green sea of heaven and the ship of the crescent moon’ are all ‘drowned in the beneficence of Ḥajjī Qawām’, sang Ḥāfiẓ in one verse.186 Although the historian Mīrkhwand definitively confirms that Ḥajjī Qawām was ‘the object of praise (mamdūḥ) of Ḥāfiẓ Shīrāzī’,187 a close examination of the main qaṣīda that he devoted to this vizier188 reveals that the main purpose of the ode lies elsewhere. Out of its 40 verses, only 12 (vv. 11–21, 37, 40) concern the vizier; the rest upbraid the poet’s ancient foe: the pharisetical ascetic (v. 8), or are dedicated to his usual bacchanalian, pastoral and erotic themes. One verse (30) features Ḥāfiẓ’s personal interpretation of Ḥallāj’s drunken apotheositic utterance: ‘I am God’ – Anā’l-Ḥaqq. Any discerning critic can thus view the vizier’s person as merely a stained glass window through which Ḥāfiẓ’s own poetico-mystical teachings irradiated. This seems to be the gist of his boast at the end of the poem (vv. 36–7):

  Many there are who are Ḥāfiẓ, who preserve the holy book

  But none like me the world through who can collect

  The minutiae of philosophy with the Qur’ān’s text.

  With all this praise of mine bestowed on you

  I pray that life stretch out a thousand years for you,

  Though for the likes of you such rare wares do seem cheap.189

  Although there is no doubt but that Ḥāfiẓ regarded Abū Isḥāq’s reign fondly and mourned its passing with poigency,190 other than a few stray allusions in his verse, there is no evidence that our poet was in any way formally ‘attached’ as a courtier to Abū Isḥāq’s court.191

  Following Abū Isḥāq, it was during the reign of the ‘Holy Warrior for the Faith’ – Mubāriz al-Dīn (754/1353–759/1358) – that so many of Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals attacking religious fundamentalism and hypocrisy, and railing against town preachers, local ascetics and surly mystics masquerading as Sufis, were penned. After conquering Fars, as Ghanī informs us:

  Mubāriz al-Dīn began to show great respect and deference to the puritan ascetics [zuhād], jurisconsults and severe Sharī‘a-oriented clerics. He focused popular attention on the sayings of the Prophet [ḥadīth], exegesis of the Qur’ān, and discussions pertaining to the religious law. All the taverns were closed down, their casks of wine emptied in the streets, and the town’s dens of vice [kharābāt] boarded up. When the doors of the taverns are shut, what other shop will be left open except that of religious hypocrisy [riyā]?192 He went to such excesses in prosecuting ‘vice’ and commanding people to pursue ‘virtue’, that the wits and the comics of the metropolis soon mocked him with the sobriquet ‘the Policeman’ [muḥtasib].193

  Ḥāfiẓ often refers to this oppressive Islamicist dictator, the most celebrated verse in this context being:

  Although the breeze waft in the scent of roses,

  And the wine bring on good cheer, beware: don’t drink

  To the tune of the harp – for sharp is the Policeman’s ear.194

  There are a number of other ghazals in which Ḥāfiẓ complains about the ‘Policeman’s’ ban on music, lamenting the ‘cutting of the harp’s lovely locks’195 and ‘boarding up the tavern doors’196 in bowlderized Mubārizistān. In fact, it was
partly as a foil to this religious dictatorship that Ḥāfiẓ elaborated his most famous symbol – the inspired libertine (rind) – as a representative of the spiritual and intellectual counter-culture of the city.

  The religious inquisition instituted by this ruler has been compared (by ‘Abd al-Ḥusayn Zarrīnkūb) with those that prevailed in Europe during the Middle Ages. During his reign certain books were banned as being ‘useless texts’ (kutub maḥrūmat al-intifā‘), before being collected and their pages washed clean. Mubāriz al-Dīn at one point demanded that the poet Sa‘dī’s mausoleum be burnt down and recitation of his poems be forbidden in the city’s Islamic Republic, since his hired mullahs had divined certain heretical sentiments in his verses. His son Shāh Shujā‘, however, intervened and persuaded him to change his mind, assuring him that he was personally confident of Sa‘dī’s penitent and pious nature.197 Mubāriz al-Dīn’s bloodthirsty and violent nature was notorious. It was said that he would sit in his chamber reciting the Qur’ān, and then would have criminals summoned before him, rise from his place and kill them with his own hands, before resuming his recitation.198