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

  ‘I’ve heard rumours that you’ve executed 1,000 people by your own hand’, Shāh Shujā‘ once asked his father.

  ‘On the contrary, it was only 800 maximum’199 came the reassuring riposte.

  Having been cursed and threatened with death several times by his father,200 Shāh Shujā‘ had foresight enough to blind and then depose him, snuffing out the nasty puritanical autocrat to the delight of the Shīrāzī intelligentsia.201 Like everyone else, Ḥāfiẓ was ecstatic that the policeman was finally dead and gone. In a panegyrical ghazal addressed to Mubāriz al-Dīn’s much beloved and admired vizier Abū Naṣr Abū’l-Ma‘ālī in 759/1357,202 he celebrated his demise:

  The cop is gone! How great the news! Oh heart, oh God,

  The world’s full of wine and ale-drinking demigods.203

  Ḥāfiẓ’s delight in the newly liberated atmosphere of the city after the Shāh Shujā‘’s parricide of his puritanical father is evident from one of his ghazals that begins: ‘At dawn, I heard a supernatural voice that conveyed good news to me: “It’s the Age of Shujā‘ – drink wine and have no fear”.’204 During Shāh Shujā‘’s largely benevolent reign (761/1359–786/1384)205 many of Ḥāfiẓ’s greatest erotic and bacchanalian lyrics were composed, and scholars claim that over half the (quite few) references to Persian princes and patrons in Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān were to Shāh Shujā‘.206 There seems to have been much personal affection between them,207 for the poet and the monarch shared much in common in matters of taste and learning. Both had memorized the Qur‘ān. Given the evident intimacy between the poet and the prince, some historians speculate he might have held a post in Shāh Shujā‘’s government.208

  The monarch was a dilettante scholar with a powerful memory who was widely read in classical Arabic and Persian literature, Islamic law and theology.209 He was also a fair poet with a minor Dīvān210 to his name. The historian Mīrkhwand recorded that ‘there are poems both in Arabic and Persian that he wrote that people still recite today’.211

  Ḥāfiẓ addressed several panegyrical ghazals to Shāh Shujā‘ (in one, praising him as ‘that epiphany of pre-eternal Grace, light to the eyes of Hope, that compendium of practice and knowledge, that Anima Mundi – Shāh Shujā‘’),212 as well as one long ode (qaṣīda).213 Using the poetic device of ‘literary greeting’ (istiqbāl), he also wrote ghazals which paid homage to the prince’s own poems.214 However, while reputable historical sources do indeed attest that Shāh Shujā‘ was an object of Ḥāfiẓ’s praise (mamdūḥ),215 he was also an object of his reproach and rebuke. Thus, in the same ghazal, referring to the ruler’s Turkish family connection through his mother, Ḥāfiẓ indirectly reproaches the ruler for listening to slander by the poet’s rivals.216 Under Shāh Shujā‘’s reign, Ḥāfiẓ’s fame reached its apogee, with him gaining renown and respect throughout the entire Persian-speaking world.217

  During the final decade of the poet’s life in Shīrāz, the instability of political circumstances increased as fortunes of the Muẓaffarid dynasty began to fluctuate and wane. Shāh Shujā‘’s son, Zayn al-‘Ābidīn, succeeded him, but only held on to the reins of power for four years (786/1384–789/1387), before he was deposed. Mīrkhwānd218 and ‘Abd al-Razzāq Samarqandī,219 contemporary Persian historians, tell us that Ḥāfiẓ composed the following ghazal for Zayn al-‘Ābidīn on the occasion of the prince’s returning from a battle and upon triumphal entry into Shīrāz:

  The firmament augured well for you;

  It gave you favour on that day you took

  Up arms – so as to test your gratitude

  And see how you’d give thanks and meet your dues.

  For kingship’s pomp and glory are not worth

  A mite in Love’s precinct. – Confess yourself

  A slave and acknowledge your servitude.

  Take heed of one who stumbled, yet God lent him

  A hand – and know from this that fallen men

  Must stir in you your pity and distress.

  And when you cross the threshold with the wine

  Cup-bearer! Bear good news, so your entrance cause

  These worldly griefs but once to leave my heart.

  The royal road of pomp and circumstance

  Has many perils. It is best you march atop

  That knoll with not much baggage on your back.

  The Sultan and his fighting men, in love

  With jewels and crowns – the dervish with his peace

  Of mind and nook fit for a vagabond.

  My eyes’ very light! Allow me cite for you

  One Sufi bon mot: ‘Peace excels resort

  To arms and is better than hostility.’

  To satisfy ambition, slake desire

  And gain one’s ends depends upon one’s thought

  And will: the king proposes his good deeds,

  Then God disposes His success and grace.

  Don’t brush the dust and grime of poverty

  And contentment – Ḥāfiẓ – off your face.

  Those stains are better than the art of alchemy.

  As can be seen from this poem, Ḥāfiẓ’ gently subverts the brags of the prince’s might such that the poem’s text completely negates its political context. Admonishing the young prince, the poet extols the dusty vestiments of his dervish habit, and like Shakespeare’s Henry VI (‘my crown is call’ed content / A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy’220), vaunts the virtues of contentment and holy poverty, before upbraiding him:

  My eyes’ very light! Allow me cite for you

  One Sufi bon mot: ‘Peace excels resort

  To arms and is better than hostility.’221

  In this profoundly Sufiesque ghazal devoted to the higher ethics of erotic theology and ideals of spiritual poverty, the poet spurns all material advantage, scorning aught but trust in God. Using exactly the same Sufi terms elsewhere,222 he says: ‘Tell the king, everyone’s daily bread is already foreordained!’ Thus, the poet scuppers the pretentions of rulers of all kingdoms who’d reign in any dominion other than the empire of the heart, turning his back on the boons of temporal lords. In fact, this so-called ‘political poem’ subverts the entire notion of what a panegryric is supposed to be.223

  The Muẓaffarids (‘Those who are Triumphant’) were disintegrating both politically and dynastically. History soon let them reap the dragon’s teeth – the traditions of parricide and fratricide that made the family socially so notorious in medieval Persia – they had sown. Less than two decades later, all members of the Muẓaffarid royal family were extirpated by that scourge of the late medieval Islamic world, Tamerlane.

  Near Iṣfahān in 789/1387, during one of his military campaigns, Zayn al-‘Ābidīn fell prisoner to Shāh Manṣūr, the cousin of Shāh Shujā‘, who imprisoned him and put him in chains.224 Ḥāfiẓ, who by now had come to oppose Zayn al-‘Ābidīn, a lightheaded, proud and politically inept ruler,225 was delighted at this turn of events, as can be seen from one ghazal.226

  In the meantime, Tamerlane, having established his grip on Transoxiania, had been making incursions into Fars. Shāh Yaḥyā, a nephew of Shāh Shujā‘, took charge of Shīrāz at his bequest.227 He managed to hold the citadel of saints for about half a year (late 789/1387), during which time Ḥāfiẓ, now in his late 60s or early 70s, wrote a famous ghazal for him.228 Although, unusually enough, the poem does have very panegyical overtones – for its ‘exaggerated magniloquence’,229 the poet was rebuked by a contemporary historian – yet deep theosophical meanings can be also found in some of its verses.230

  In November, Tamerlane carefully collected and counted the heads of the population he had just massacred (historians still debate how many skulls there were: some say 70,000; some say 200,000) in Iṣfahān,231 erecting 28 sconce minarets around the city which bore witness to the psychopathic nature of his brutality. At the head of his army of Turkic berserkers, he then marched on Shīrāz, where he arrived in December 789/1387.

  Of Ḥāfiẓ’s purported meeting with Tam
erlane at the end of his life we know nothing, if indeed it ever took place, but evidence from the Dīvān suggests that he had even less sympathy for the limping conqueror than he did for Zayn al-‘Ābidīn. In a famous verse penned a decade earlier,232 Ḥāfiẓ had recorded his grief over Tamerlane’s massacres and sacking of Transoxiania’s cities. Dawlatshāh Samarqandī’s legendary account, written a century later, of Tamerlane’s upbraiding the aged poet during his visit for his prodigality – rebuking Ḥāfiẓ’s readiness, in one of the earliest poems of the Dīvān, to bestow ‘all the dominion of Bukhārā and Samarqand for the sake of a black mole of that Shīrāzī Turk’233 – is probably but a fond biographer’s romantic reverie. Yet the moral it inculcates is truer than all historical fact: that one erotic verse penned by Persia’s greatest lyric poet – Shelley never more truly spoke when he said poets are ‘the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’234 – consigned to oblivion the imperial pretensions of the most fearsome state terrorist of the entire late Islamic Middle Ages.235

  Remaining in Shīrāz for only two months, Tamerlane was called back to Samarqand on unfinished military business, at which point Shāh Manṣūr, b. Shāh Muẓaffarī, a cousin of Shāh Shujā‘, took the city from Shāh Yaḥyā in a bloodless coup. Manṣūr, who managed to hold on to the city for the next four years (791/1388–795/1392), was regarded highly by Ḥāfiẓ, who celebrated his rule in Shīrāz and the departure of Tamerlane with a ghazal dedicated to him.236 Several other poems237 in which verses are penned in praise of this prince appear in the Dīvān. Many of the years of Shāh Manṣūr’s brief reign were preoccupied in fighting Zayn al-‘Ābidīn, who, having escaped from prison and taken over the city Iṣfahān, tried numerous times to reconquer Shīrāz, although the incumbent prince proved a superior strategist in all their confrontations, on each occasion defeating Zayn al-‘Ābidīn, before finally capturing and blinding him.238 At the end of one of his most famous erotic ghazals dedicated to the ruler, Ḥāfiẓ indirectly alludes to Shāh Manṣūr’s success in one such intertribal battle, celebrating how ‘Victory shone that day for Shāh Manṣūr, who single-handedly charged at the centre of a thousand of their troops and struck off heads of foes with his sword’.239

  Shāh Manṣūr spent the last three years of his rule occupied in the conquest of towns and cities and military campaigns around Iran, until he finally died on the battlefield in 795/April 1393240 bravely wielding his sword against Tamerlane, whom he nearly killed in combat, before the walls of the city.241 Ḥāfiẓ had been fortunate enough to pass away three years earlier, in 792/1389, before the hated Tamerlane invaded his beloved city. A few weeks after the Samaraqandī Turk took the citadel of saints, he executed all the remaining representatives of the Muẓaffarid dynasty, save for only two family members (among them the blinded Zayn al-‘Ābidīn), both of whom he exiled to Transoxiania.242

  In the end, Abū Isḥāq Īnjū... Shāh Shujā‘... Shāh Manṣūr, and their courts and the viziers who served them, figured as convenient and significant components of the poet’s socio-political persona. But just as none save a handful of trained historians ever bring to mind the intrigues of the court of Queen Elizabeth when reading Spenser’s Faery Queen, hardly a soul reading Ḥāfiẓ today recalls the exploits and escapades of Abū Isḥaq, Ḥajjī Qawām, Shāh Shujā‘, Zayn al-‘Ābidīn or Shāh Manṣūr. The main reason that these princes and their ministers’ names are not utterly forgotten today is because they have been stamped with the eternity of Ḥāfiẓ’s genius. Although a few panegyrical ghazals to these rulers and patrons were penned by Ḥāfiẓ, his true addressee remains the beloved / Beloved sui generis, not his/her temporal incarnations. As Ghanī emphasizes, ‘because of the fluctuations of political fortunes in fourteenth-century Persia – where cliques in power today were often replaced by parties opposing them tomorrow – Ḥāfiẓ usually extolled the person he aimed to praise [mamdūḥ] as a beloved [ma‘shūq], using a lover’s romantic language and the ghazal’s erotic lexicon for this purpose, which was one of peculiarities of the style of his ghazal composition’. This was not a personal idiosyncracy on his part, he reiterates, for during this period ‘all writers and poets generally avoided all but indirect allusions to topical affairs, veiling their personal feelings in general statements’.243

  So even when Ḥāfiẓ named names and praised princes by royal titles or patrons with their habitual laudatory sobriquets, the poet’s key discourse remains unintelligible to those unfamiliar with the allusive language of Eros.244 The praise he voiced of the personalities of patrons, princes or viziers does not concern any matter-of-fact history of their circumstances, but is to be taken symbolically, not literally.245 Their personages figure more often than not as metaphors conveying a deeper message pertaining to his ethical teachings, general views on social reform, malāmatī spirituality or erotic–metaphysical vision.246 In fact, the least important idea in any ghazal by Ḥāfiẓ that has panegyrical overtones is the physical person of the so-called object of praise (mamdūḥ). Ḥāfiẓ’s sophisticated lyrics are love songs, paeans in praise of Eros both human and divine. Passion in love and dispassion vis-à-vis all worldly attachments are his two grand themes: ‘The dervish has no need to bric-a-brac from the prince’s court. All we own is a tattered cloak gone up in flames’247; ‘The world and all its affairs is nought upon nought: I have verified this point a thousand times.’248 While clearly proud of the fact that his poetry was widely admired and read in princely circles,249 Ḥāfiẓ also vaunts his independence of kingly patronage and declares that he will not bother to return ‘the greetings of any king who do not humbly abase themselves kiss the threshold of this door’.250 Addressing the monarch, he declares: ‘We shall not ruin the reputation of Sufi poverty nor forsake our contentment [qanā‘at] with God. Go tell the King that everyone’s daily bread has been preordained by Providence.’251 Although Ḥāfiẓ was not by any means a republican, in the free-spirited avocation of his creed of love he was an independent spirit petulantly impatient of all political authority, boasting that ‘the lover does not fear any judge, nor tremble before state police’.252 Emerson, I think rightly, intuited that ‘intellectual liberty, which is a certificate of profound thought’253 is the central hallmark of Ḥāfiẓ’s thought. Freedom – ‘by grace of the bounty-of-Amor [dawlat-i ‘ishq]’254 – from palace and court, college and seminary, minister and mullah – expressed as a kind of ekstasis, an exit from self, an intoxication, is the source of all physical and spiritual pleasure for Ḥāfiẓ, as he exclaims:

  What bliss! – That instant of disassociation,

  When blessed by licence of intoxication,

  I exorcize my ties from both vizier and prince.255

  In the introduction to his recent two-volume commentary on Ḥāfiẓ’s poems, Muḥammad Isti‘lāmī, a leading scholar of classical Persian Sufi literature and collator of the best critical edition of Rūmī’s Mathnawī, underlines the fallacy of interpreting Ḥāfiẓ as if he were just another traditional Persian court poet. To illuminate the essentially extra-courtly nature of Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry, the following passage bears citation:

  Ḥāfiẓ was not a professional panegyric poet who praised kings after the fashion of ‘Unṣurī, Farrukhī and Amīr Mu‘izzī. In many of the ghazals that he sent to kings and national ministers those verses where a said prince or vizier is the object of praise are set off from the rest of the ghazal. Compared to the rest of the lines in these ghazals (whose themes are largely erotic or mystical), those verses reveal an entirely different ambience. Nonetheless, some later authors who wrote historical works or memoirs of the poets – and following them modern scholars – have taken those few verses to imply that Ḥāfiẓ was a panegyric poet pure and simple. They believed him to have been affiliated, as were ‘Unṣurī, Farrukhī and Amīr Mu‘izzī, to a certain royal court. They have even taken great pains to es
tablish that all the verses of a said ghazal constitute nothing but veiled praise for a certain king or vizier. For instance, wherever Ḥāfiẓ qualifies his beloved with the epithet of ‘the royal rider’ [shahsavār], they have laboured, even though the context absolutely dictates otherwise, to treat this term as synonymous with Abū’l-favāris [‘lord of the riders’], one of the titles of Shāh Shujā‘. They have not even bothered to notice that if such a phrase, for example, like ‘the remedy for our weak heart lies in your lip’256 is interpreted as being a species of panegyric praise, where will it all end up? Is this supposed to imply that Shāh Shujā‘ was asked to grant a kiss to Ḥāfiẓ by way of a royal boon from his blessed lip!? Such trite and superficial interpretations appear a dime a dozen in the works of many so-called ‘Ḥāfiẓologists’ today. But if we are to gain anything like a logical and rational understanding of Ḥāfiẓ’s lexicon one basic point can’t be stressed enough: he was not a court poet. The panegyric verses that he wrote in praise of kings and viziers in his Dīvān are quite few and far in between.257

  Ultimately, while Shāh Shujā‘, Shāh Manṣūr and other rulers and statesmen featured in his Dīvān do have significance as personalities in the political theatre of horrors of medieval Persia, what Ḥāfiẓ lovers prize today is their conceptualization in Ḥāfiẓ’s wider lyrical drama, not their historical role on the passing stage of time and place and circumstance. The bright parti-coloured robes of Ḥāfiẓ’s immortal verse lay drapped over the shoulders of those patrons and princes indeed, but it was their honour and glory to serve ‘as the temporary dress in which the poet’s creations must be arrayed and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty... for the alloy of costume, habit, etc., [is] necessary to temper this planetary music for mortal ears’.258 The jottings of historians’ gossip may occasionally lay bare the political context of this or that ghazal or line, but tell us nothing about the unvarying philosophical subtext of all Ḥāfiẓ’s poems, which is love. Eros his polis, not Shīrāz; Eros, the object of his praise, not the court of any prince or vizier: