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

  You know I never did once peruse

  Those tales of Alexander or Darius,

  So don’t ever ask me recite else

  But the words of faith and love.259

  Prolegomenon to the Study of Ḥāfiẓ

  2 – The Mystical Milieu: Ḥāfiẓ’s Erotic Spirituality

  Ḥāfiẓ and the Inspired Libertine (rind)

  The philosophical significance and erotico-mystical connotations of the subversive piety of the ‘inspired libertine’, or rind, has preoccupied readers of Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry for generations. The main reason for our fascination is that the whole notion of inspired libertinism (rindī) presents a major moral problem: as an ethical category disengaged from conventional piety (taqwā) and asceticism (zuhd), it leaves Ḥāfiẓ open to the accusation of simply being an advocate of hedonism and sybaritic debauchery. The virtually indefinable260 and paradoxical ethic of the inspired libertine was summarized by the Iranian philosopher Dayyush Shayegan as follows:

  In this concept we find a sense of immoderacy, a behaviour out of the ordinary, shocking, scandalous, able to disorient the most composed spirits, a nonconformity which derives not so much from ostentation as from the explosive exhuberance of a vision so rich, so full, that it cannot manifest itself without doing violence to everyday banality and without breaking the limits defined by the normality of things. This term expresses, further, a predilection for the uncertain, for language that is veiled and masked, for hints and insinuations, which in the authentic rend are expressed in inspired paradoxes [shaṭḥiyāt] ... Finally, there is in this concept a boundless love of the divine such as we see in the great thinkers and mystics of Iranian spirituality; but detached from its mystical content, it is transformed into fanaticism and, steered by hominess magni, to the psychology of the mob.261

  Although reconciling the differences between the unitive, ascetic and ecstatic tendencies of mystical traditions and the more mundane concerns of society has always been a fundamental problem in the history of religions, and is not particular to Islamic thought,262 a number of other scholars – lacking any real nuanced insight into the psychology of religion, and unable to perceive any shades in the spectrum of religion and ethics beyond the conventional blackness of sin and whiteness of virtue – have in fact interpreted Ḥāfiẓ’s doctrine of rindī literally as implying an advocacy of debauchery pure and simple.263 Other students of the poet have equated Ḥāfiẓ’s notion of the rind with a kind of Camusian immoralist existentialist avant la lettre. According to the latter interpretation, ‘the free-thinking libertine [rind] is a enlightened mystic [‘ārif] who will neither surrender himself to following the dictates of hypocritical spiritual leaders nor bend his knee to the brute power and dictatorial will of political authority. He rejects and regards them all with scornful indifference’.264 Regarding these and other similar secular constructions put on the poet, Khurramshāhī judiciously comments:

  Although there is a type of rind who is an irreligious freethinker, the rind of Ḥāfiẓ is preoccupied and concerned with the obligations of religion. While he believes in and reflects upon the Life Hereafter, he does not fear it since he finds that divine Love and Grace are his real saviours. Nor does he rely on his own piety, knowledge, learning, or understanding. Contrary to the ascetic [zāhid] – even the true ascetic – the rind is not someone who goes to an extreme in giving priority to the Life Hereafter, neither does he consider the life of the world to be entirely insubstantial or without basis.265

  The inspired libertine (rind) is the most manifest yet most camouflaged, the most publically promulgated yet most carefully disguised figure in Ḥāfiẓ’s religion of love (madhhab-i ‘ishq).266 Ensconced and encoded within this key term can be found all the important theosophical notions in Ḥāfiẓ’s thought. While the poetic terms rind and rindī occur frequently in earlier Persian theoerotic poets, especially in ‘Aṭṭār,267 these terms only take on a central role in the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ, who made them the key concept in his writing, using them to qualify his spiritual position and degree – and in this respect, he has no predecessor in Persian belles lettres.268

  Although Ḥāfiẓ’s conception of rind and rindī is multi-dimensional, there are basically three facets of his doctrine: social, literary and metaphysical, that will concern me here:

  • the rind as a socio-political phenomenon

  • the rind as a literary–allegorical trope belonging to the qalandariyya genre

  • the rind as a symbol in Sufi erotic theology for a degree of advanced spiritual realization.

  Each of these facets is examined individually below.

  The Rindān: Mafia of Medieval Persia

  Viewed from the social-historical perspective of fourteenth-century Shīrāzī society, the rogues and rakes (rindān) of Persia in Ḥāfiẓ’s day were actually Mafioso thugs and hoodlums in charge of specific quarters of the city, exactly like Sicilian or Italian gangsters who control large neighbourhoods of New York City, Chicago or Milan today. Although the rindān theoretically occupied the lowest rung in the social hierarchy, they were extremely powerful and feared for their ruthlessness, for most of the city’s hired assassins, professional thugs and thieves belonged to their company. The princes who ruled the city were essentially in thrall to these gangs of thugs, for Ḥāfiẓ’s Shīrāz, though famed abroad for its pious mystics and men of learning, was also a ‘city of hoodlums’ (shahr-i rindān).269 As John Limbert explains: ‘Few cities combined so much hedonism and so much spiritualism as Shīrāz. As far as the government was concerned, the dissipations of the rendan were preferable to the fasts of the zahedan or ascetics. For while the latter worked at the simplest jobs and paid few taxes, the former were steady customers of the kharabat (vice-dens) – the brothels (beit al-lotf), wine-shops (sharabkhaneh), opium-dens (bangkhaneh), and gambling houses (qomarkhaneh) – all of which paid tamgha to the treasury.’270 The hoodlums were known for sensational adventurism (mājarā-jū’ī), contempt for conventional religious morality, along with a devil-may-care attitude (lā-ubālīgarī), and their deliberate courting of infamy and notoriety. In his chapter on the ‘Ethics of Dervishes’ in the Rose Garden (Gulistān), Sa‘dī provides a good vignette of their typical conduct in Shīrāz a century earlier:

  A gang of hoodlums [ṭāyifa-i rindān] came across a dervish and spoke abusively to him, calling him bad names, striking him with blows, causing him sore offence and grievous bodily harm. He went to the Master of the Path (pīr-i ṭarīqat) to complain of their conduct. The latter replied, ‘My son, this dervish mantle of yours is the garb of Contentment. Whoever wears the mantle yet cannot bear to have his desires thwarted is an impostor. Such are forbidden to wear dervish robes.’271

  In only one ghazal does Ḥāfiẓ mention these lowlife hoodlums in the bars and brothels of Shīrāz, the rind-i bazārī, marketplace rakes272 of the city’s underbelly which fill the pages of other contemporary poets such as ‘Ubayd Zākānī. The figure of the rind celebrated in his lyrics is not like these coarse and dissolute characters at all, but rather a nonconformist type of refined aesthetic and spiritual values.273 In Ḥāfiẓ’s inspired libertine appears a sophisticated aesthetic discernment and spiritual urbanity missing from the raffish hooligans who frequented Shīrāz’s dens of vice. In this context, as Shayegan underlines, the word rind evokes:

  a lively lucidity, a savoir faire, a refinement of action, a tact that goes all the way to compliance, a discretion in speech, which are neither craft nor hypocrisy, nor an affectation of mystery; but can, outside their context, become those very things, being reduced to insidous shifts, not to say dissembling and imposture. Again, the term denotes an interior liberty, an authentic detachment from the things of this world, suggesting the deliverance, in however small a measure, of the man who, shaking off his tawdry finery, lays himself open without sham, and naked to the mirror of the world; however, degenerated from its primitive context, this attitude can turn into one of exhibitionism, of posing and
of mere libertinage.274

  It is true that the word rind recalled to the majority of the poet’s contemporary readers (and still does today) the spirit of the chivalrous ruffian; indeed, the reckless mystique and colourful character of these mobsters and desperados had influenced the development of the poetic and mystical image of the rind in medieval Sufi poetry.275 That such connotations are an integral part of Ḥāfiẓ’s poems cannot be argued away, but to posit a literal one-to-one equivalency between the two is absurd.276 Arguments to this effect in a sophisticated form exhibit the debilitating effects of insisting that anything that is true must be exclusively true and that the presence of one implication necessarily diminishes the force of counter-implications that are also present.

  What is clear is that the very ambivalence of the term enabled Ḥāfiẓ’s inspired libertine to acquire a kind of succès de scandale through being coloured with association with the shady character of the infamous hoodlums of Shīrāz. Transforming their badge of infamy and dishonour and shame into acclaim and fame, the inspired libertine thus cut a dash through his poems as a kind of revolutionary religious intellectual in society, an iconoclastic rebel who adhered to the religion of Eros as a counter-faith to the prevailing hardline fundamentalist version of orthodoxy and the moribund Islamic puritanism of his day. In the conventional religiously oriented society of fourteenth-century Persia, the libertine of course had largely a negative social value. In the realm of spiritual truth, however – in respect to which many of the seminary-trained clerics, ascetics and Sufis of the period were in practice quite often impostors and fraudsters pretending piety – the rebellious social image of the libertine rake in all his dissolute and impious notoriety quite appropriately complemented, and in fact expressed in mirror image, the real nature of the ascetic Sufi or formalist Muslim cleric.277 In one verse he even moans to his mistress that the ‘inspired libertines’ of her kingdom are in fact the true saints, but, alas, the cognoscenti of the spirit who might recognize these ‘Friends of God’ (valī-shināsān) have long ago departed:

  For the pious rakes’ thirsting lips nobody

  Anymore can spare a cup, and those who could

  Purview the saints seem all to have fled this land.278

  As pointed out above, many of Ḥāfiẓ’s most bitterly anti-clerical ghazals were composed under the fundamentalist dictatorship of Mubāriz al-Dīn (reg. 754/1353–759/ 1357) immediately following Abū Isḥāq Īnjū’s tolerant reign (743/1342–754/1353). Comparing this king’s ‘religious Inquisition’ with those that afflicted Europe a few centuries later, ‘Abd al-Ḥusayn Zarrīnkūb highlights the dangerous political climate in which such ghazals were composed:

  During the ‘born-again’ king Mubāriz al-Dīn’s reign of terror ... the struggle against this merciless hypocrite – who had been nicknamed the ‘policeman’ [muḥtasib] by the rogues of the city, being notorious for his excessively cruel and ruthless nature – was not the job of the ordinary thugs and rogues of the marketplace [rindān-i bazārī]. They were on the payroll of other strongmen and henchmen, since they attached themselves to whoever held power, and willy-nilly carried out the orders of the ‘policeman’. No, the battle with this Mafioso ‘policeman’ prince was a job better left to those ‘inspired libertines who were willing to hazard everything and risk wagering all away’ [rindān-i pākbāz]. These men were the ‘schoolman libertines’, or ‘rogues of the college’ [rindān-i madrasa], who had insight into the reality of religion [ḥaqīqat-i dīn] and morality beyond such pretensions and falsehoods. It was they who realized that this sort of sanctimony and hypocritical display of piety was in fact the greatest threat to honest religion and morality.279

  Hazardous as it was to express anti-prohibitionist sentiments in the Islamic Republic of Mubāriz’s Shīrāz, these ‘schoolmen libertines’ struggled as best they could in the oppressive political climate. In the following verse in which he satirically refers to Mubāriz al-Dīn as ‘the policeman’,280 Ḥāfiẓ even manages to draw a moral from his hypocritical religious behaviour, giving some mordant advice which will evoke sympathy in anyone who has ever lived under the strictures of a religious theocracy:

  Take your cue from the policeman and learn of him, oh heart

  The way of the libertines’ inspired faith, for he is drunk

  Yet none of him suspects this true.281

  If Ḥāfiẓ’s rind were but an ordinary street thug and his notion of the inspired libertine’s faith the literary equivalent of contemporary gangsta-rap, a lowlife hero so obvious and so material would be as blindly evident and boldly inarticulate as the Hollywood cowboy who preaches down the barrel of his smoking gun. Ḥāfiẓ, then, in elaborating the ethics and erotics of the inspired libertine, in declaring:

  I followed the path of the mad libertines for years –

  Long enough, until I was able with the consent

  Of intelligence to put my greediness into prison.282

  or:

  Unbound romance and love and youth comprise

  The sum of our desires, for when the inner sens

  Of such ideas converge, the shuttlecock

  Of speech may then be struck.283

  – certainly did not mean to glorify the dissolute lowlife of the Kaffeehausliterat or wax magniloquent over the nightlife pub-crawling through the bordellos and brothels of medieval Shīrāz, after the fashion of – say – Francois Villon’s ballads or Arthur Rimbaud’s (1854–91) revolt against Christianity in the name of a ‘higher licentiousness’ in Une Saison en enfer.284 Ḥāfiẓ’s rind is neither tricky politician, shameless opportunist, confidence man nor political crook. Such worldly con-men are in fact ‘uninspired libertines’, who lack the sacred dimension which is the soul of the rind; their fibbing and fabulation but expose the depths of their merely mundane deceit. The inspired libertine on the other hand reveals the world’s deceit: ‘wise-to-the-bait’ of its charms, his actions serve to subvert and unmask the pretensions of the entire materialist mentality in both its religious and secular forms.285

  The literary sources of Ḥāfiẓ’s doctrine of the inspired libertine can be traced back to the sophisticated literary tradition of poetry written in praise of the rite of the spiritual vagabonds (qalandariyya) and the esoteric teachings of Islamic erotic spirituality grounded in malāmatī ethics, which will be explored below.

  Ḥāfiẓ’s Malāmatī Ethic and the Rite of Spiritual Vagabonds (Qalandariyya)

  Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism,

  A heresy and schism,

  Foisted into the canon-law of love;–

  No, – wine is only sweet to happy men.

  – Keats286

  The venerable Persian literary dictionary Burhān al-Qāṭī‘ (Decisive Argument) defines the rindān (sing. rind) as folk who are ‘crafty, deceitful, clever, fearless, reprobate, desperados with a devil-may-care attitude about them [lā-ubālī]. They are called rindān because they repudiate all norms of society and reject the restraints of religious piety.’ Following this literal definition, the dictionary then adds that ‘they are people who outwardly behave in a blameworthy manner and although they incur blame [malāmat], inwardly they are of sound character [salāmat]’.287 This latter connotation draws on the classic epigrammatic definition of the malāmatī way, that ‘perseverance in endurance of blame is renunciation of security and safety [al-malāmat tark al-salāmat]’.288

  Not only does the term rind thus by definition belong to the malāmatī lexicon, it was also an important word deriving from the Sufi literary genre known as ‘Wildman poetry’ (qalandariyya).289 All Sufi poets and writers used the symbol of the qalandar to signify someone freed from the rites of hypocritical devotion in religion, liberated from the bonds and sanctions of socio-cultural convention,290 and it is with this connotation that this figure appears as a popular poetic topos in the lyrics of Sanā’ī, ‘Aṭṭār and Rūmī, in the hagiography and poetry of ‘Irāqī, as well as in the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ.291 Centuries before �
�āfiẓ, specifically in the Persian poetry of Sanā’ī and ‘Aṭṭār, the rindān’s disreputable malāmatī character had been employed as a synecdoche to personify the mystic adept’s pursuit of detachment from the ways of the world.292 As ‘Aṭṭār remarked:

  My work is turned all inside out

  With people. For the worst slur

  I think that ever I could incur

  Is commendation by the crowd.293

  The Islamic counterpart of the Hindu saddhu, the qalandar was a religious mendicant, a holy vagabond or faqīr who attired himself in outlandish garb and often shaved all facial hair save the moustache, travelling from town to town occupied in devotional practices in order to mortify his soul and disengage himself from worldly concerns. The Sufi theoreticians of medieval Persia inform us that the difference between the malāmatī and qalandar mystics was that the former sought to conceal his acts of devotion and piety, whereas the latter endeavoured to overturn and destroy established customs.294 In Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry both tendencies are visible.