Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry
Page 19
A thousand enigmas subtler, finer spun than
A strand of hair lie here, and thus not everyone
Who shaves his scalp can understand the rite of the Wildman.51
– Ḥāfiẓ
Like Christianity, Islam harbours many important antinomian traditions. By the eleventh century, antinomian mystics who considered that Islamic ritual practices and the sacred Law (sharī‘a) could be dispensed with, leaving them free to commit any transgressions and sins that they wanted to on the basis of their inspired mystical vision and enlightened understanding, had appeared among the Sufis.52 One of these antinomian traditions that originally developed among early Shi‘ite groups was the doctrine of Ibāḥat (libertinism).
A variety of terms in classical Persian literature soon became used to refer to these antinomian mystics: qalandars (vagabonds, wildmen), rind (inspired libertine), qallāsh (knave), mubāḥī (libertine), dīvāna (lunatic) and lā-ubālī (daredevil, desperado). The latter term, literally meaning ‘I couldn’t care less’, indicates a cavalier attitude that damns the consequences of all prodigal and immoral conduct. We find many verses by Sa'dī and Ḥāfiẓ praising both the daredevil lā-ubālī and the wildman qalandar attitude.53 Sa'dī says:
For learned quartos what use has the reckless lover?
Why should the lunatic’s moonstruck mind forbear
To hear the preacher’s horatory admonitions?
Why should lovers give a twit about abuse
And calumny from friend or foe? There’s not
Much choice in either case: they suffer on the rack
Of love or bear the weight of slurs and smears.54
In the following lines, Ḥāfiẓ celebrates the perfect antinomian lover in the person of the Sufi Shaykh Ṣan‘ān, who fell in love with a Christian girl, abandoned Islam, and through his apostasy demonstrated his true faith to the Religion of Love:
If you profess yourself a devotee of
The highway of most noble Love
Never give a second thought for name
Or what men say is all ‘ill-fame’,
Recall the cap and gown
Of great Shaykh Ṣan‘ān –
For months in hock, put in
The wine-seller’s shop for pawn.55
In another verse, Ḥāfiẓ again celebrates the legend of the qalandar, referring indirectly to Shaykh Ṣan‘ān, who found faith and piety in binding on Christian cincture at the bidding of the Christian girl:
What rapturous, enchanting moments
that holy roaming dervish has
who fares through all the stations of
the mystic way, who in the tangled knots
of the Christian girdle that he wears
still tills his rosary and hymns
angelic litanies and prayers.56
In these verses, Persia’s two most famous love lyricists, Sa'dī and Ḥāfiẓ, boldly announce their avocation of Eros’ creed. Making full use of the antinomian vocabulary available in Persian, they declare themselves Fedeli d’amore, indifferent to the blame and reproach of those cold souls who are disbarred from the throes of erotic passion and thus banned from entry into the precincts of Amor. As faithful servants of Love’s Path, they understood that ‘nothing exists save grace and comeliness’57 in the pursuit of love, and readily declared themselves ready to succumb to all its passions and temptations.
Although terms such as lā-ubālī, qalandar, rind, qallāsh, mubāḥī and dīvāna originally had exclusively profane meanings – referring to various types of thugs, hooligans, debauchees, lunatics, profligates, rakes and other ne’er-do-wells of society – they were soon taken over by the Sufis and integrated into the Persian Sufi poetic lexicon, where they were given positive connotations denoting higher degrees of mystical realization. Thus, the profligate became identified with a mystic of high degree, the debauchee with a pious man of prayer, the vagabond equated with a disengaged spirit liberated from sensual desires, the knave a member of the saintliest company, and the lunatic the truly Inspired Man attuned to the Voice of God. Of course, it is easy to see why today many literary critics in secular circles, who are more often than not utterly alienated from the traditional symbolic cosmos in which such emblems, symbols, tropes and types all functioned as part of a common ‘hermetic’ discourse familiar to all connoisseurs of verse, find themselves voicing doubts and disagreements about which sense precisely – profane or sacred, human or divine – such metaphors should convey. Unfortunately, most of the younger generation of Persian-speaking literati, being immersed in secular Western values, no longer recall the higher symbolic connotations of these terms. To their understanding, Ḥāfiẓ thus remains the supreme decadent and hedonist poet, leader of the world’s grand debauchees. To complicate matters further, the poetic device of īhām (amphibology) allowed the Sufi poets to marry heaven and earth, and, so to speak, condone poetic ambivalence, so that the distinctive allegorical metonymy of terms in the Sufi symbolic lexicon lent a diversification to their usages, allowing them to broadly connote both the colourful, literal ‘profane’ connotations as well as the higher figurative senses pertaining to those transcendental symbolic meanings.
If we approach the transcendental significance of some of these symbols, how the process leading to the sublimation of these metaphors occurred – and thus the raison d’ȇtre sustaining them – is easy to discern. The phrase ‘it is delightful to be mad’, for example, poetically speaking conveys a self-evident sense. Understood spiritually, however, the phrase makes no sense whatsoever unless we understand it to imply a madness above and beyond reason, rather than below reason: the lower, irrational – psychotic – insanity.58 Likewise, the expression ‘the joys of intoxication’ makes perfect sense to every secular sensibility attuned to wine’s bacchanalian pleasures. But to the philosophical temperament focused on progress in the spiritual life, it makes sense only when it refers to the drunkenness that contemplation of the Beautiful inspires – or, as the Sufis say, the ecstatic rapture that the sight of the beauteous visage of the Cup-bearer (sāqī) arouses in the beholder – stimulating intoxication without any hangover. In the same vein, the joys of freedom extolled by the Sufi poets involve their liberation from the vices of greed, anger, pride and emancipation from the vanity of ambition for honours and high rank. Liberty is as much a spiritual virtue as licence is a moral vice. That wanton witness-of-beauty (shāhid-i harjā’ī) celebrated in Sufi mystical poetry is that icon of supreme loveliness, whose ravishingly attractive countenance is everywhere reflected, both in man and nature alike.59 When Sufi mystics proudly announce that they ‘revel in the delights of desire [havas]’, their apparently sybarite sentiment takes as its transcendental reference point the ‘grand desire’ of the adept to realize freedom from selfhood, as Rūmī states:
There lies in no man’s head
Such desire as lies in mine;
The desire I sense is such that
I’m bereft of all ken of self.60
Similarly, Sanā’ī boasts of his own ‘desire’ (havas) animating his poetic inspiration:
The magic diablerie of conjurers
from Indian lands, graces
his breath of inspiration;
The subtle Chinese portraitists
whose art all faces unmasks
lend his desires animation.61
In Ḥāfiẓ’s verse as well, we find that the fulfilment of desire in love implies a freedom from self-interest and the renunciation of selfish desire:
My heart – disport
Your head: loveplay’s
Not jesting business.
Nobody has yet struck
Eros’s shuttlecock
With Desire’s bat.62
Here Ḥāfiẓ contrasts the transcendental nature of ‘true love’ (‘ishq) to the pursuit of idle erotic amusement, which in comparison seems but a kind of shallow ‘sport’ (bāzī) and selfish ‘desire’ (havas): this term here having no transcendent mystical implication. In this re
spect, Ḥāfiẓ often clarifies that the flames of his erotic longing and fire of his desire (ātash-i havas) were not inspired by any temporal passion, but that his passion was enkindled in pre-Eternity when the uncreated souls of men first professed divine love for their Lord:
Flushed and scorched in desire’s sultry flames today
Ḥāfiẓ’s heart not only now aches with woe,
A brand of grief sears him likes the anemone
For now, for always – and since pre-eternity.63
This type of holy antinomianism and pious libertinism is best described in a ghazal by Rūmī devoted to the ‘lovers’ and the ‘gnostics’, which describes them as a debauched company of profligates and libertines. In this poem he employs all the important technical terms used in Islamic theology to refer to antinomian debauchees – in particular, the mubāḥī, a wild libertine who is utterly outside the pale of all Islamic faith and piety, and the ibāḥatī, the pursuer of libertine ways. For those who believe that Sufism constitutes a basically heterodox anti-Islamic mystical ideology falsely masquerading under Muslim robes, Rūmī’s poem brings unwelcome news, for he immediately subverts his own subversive rhetoric, clarifying that there is a higher mystical significance beneath his profane terms:
Today we’ve got songs and an amphora
full of wine and the music of Samā‘;
A Saki stone-drunk bears us the wine
among this crowd of wayward libertines.
They’re ‘far-out’ libertines, in fact, they’ve passed
beyond existence – not decadent, demented
Dope-fiend types, high on hemp or hash:
the blacked-out addicts of the lowlife.64
In the first line of this ghazal, the ‘Saki stone-drunk’ (Sāqī-yi bad-mast) is a symbol for Rūmī’s spiritual master Shams-i Tabrīzī. He also clarifies that this ‘crowd of wayward libertines’ (jam‘-i mubāḥī) are lovers – that is, spiritually advanced mystics who have ‘passed beyond existence’ into a realm where the limitations of the illusory Selfhood, with its ‘me’ and ‘thee’, are abolished. Such ‘libertines’ are not lowlife substance abusers giggling time away on hashish, nor common dope addicts huddling among the dregs of society, but transcendentalists who have not only transcended themselves, but have dismissed the Angel of Death from their dominion.65
In exactly the same manner as Rūmī, Ḥāfiẓ (supposedly a hedonist and founding father of libertine teachings in Persian poetry) also clarifies that he eschews self-indulgent antinomianism (mubāḥāt) in one important verse:
Heart-friend, I guide you well along Salvation’s way:
Neither by sin vaunt iniquity nor hawk austerity.66
The Sin of Repentance in the Religion of Love
Although Repentance (tawba) is normally listed as the first stage of the Sufi path, in the religion of love, repentance came to be considered a reprehensible vice and terrible sin. In a ghazal whose rhyme phrase is ‘I have repented’ (tawba kardam), Rūmī thus quips:
In the sacrament of penitence’s sin
and in the exercise of penance’s crime,
Neck-deep I lay, but now of all that sin
I make amends: my penance was the crime.67
In his Mathnawī, Rūmī describes how the black slave Bilāl, one of the earliest converts to Islam, was tortured by his Jewish owners for his new faith. The Prophet’s wealthy companion, Abū Bakr (who eventually emancipated Bilāl), advised him to conceal his beliefs from his cruel overlord. Bilāl, however, was unable to dissimulate and hide his fervour for God, despite being stretched out in the hot Arabian desert sun and beaten with clubs capped with thorns until he bled. In the following verses, we hear Abū Bakr advise Bilāl to ‘repent’ of his indiscretion, and how Bilāl rejects repentance:
Again, he said, ‘Repent!’ Again, at once
he did, but Eros whisked away repentance.
Repentance of this ilk he carried on,
till penance caused him detestation.
He spoke his faith out loud, his flesh gave up
to Fortune’s frowns, adversity, hardship.
‘My penitential vows, Oh Prophet, you
oppose, yet every vein is full of you!
There is no room in me for culpa mea,
for penance, penitence or penalty!
All sacraments of penance such as this
I scorn. Who’d ever spurn eternal bliss?!
For Eros is a mighty force: I’m trounced
by his imperious might; I’m crushed;
In Eros’ bitter, vinegary furor
I’m sweet and luscious – savoury as sugar.’
... To be a lover, yet act with patience,
sangfroid to hold to vows of penitence,
This is, great soul though you indeed may be,
a senseless, comical absurdity:
For patience’s but a snail, Eros is a dragon;
the latter all divine, the former only human.68
Here we see Love considered to be a ‘sacred sin’ that is paradoxically the source of all piety and religious belief. According to this erotic creed, the quintessence of Islam lies in committing the ‘divine crime’ of love, and to repent of love is sin and heresy. A good flavour of these wildly passionate sentiments that permeate all classical Persian poetry in general, and underpin Sufi erotics in particular, can be found in these three verses by, respectively, Rūmī, Sa'dī and Ḥāfiẓ:
Alas, what sin or crime is this, of which
Repentance of its but vile wickedness?
Behind, I’d dodge but cannot flee away;
Before, I’d come yet there’s no place to stay.69
Go tell all men, go let the folk
Be told that I’m a lover and a drunk.
This name and fame, I boast of it,
I’m proud to say all vows I’ve broke...70
The bedrock of our famous repentance seemed
To be tough as granite. Look, the delicate
Glass cup has split the repentance at the first blow.71
The most famous illustration of this critical attitude towards the ascetic ideals of ‘repentance’ in classical Persian poetry is found in ‘Aṭṭār’s story of the pious Sufi master Shaykh Ṣan’ān, mentioned above. Following the promptings of a dream, Ṣan’ān travelled with a large band of disciples from Mecca to Byzantium. There, seeing an unveiled Christian girl in a window, he was smitten by love. She disdained him at first, forcing him to spend sleepless nights on her doorstep. Eventually, however, she relented and accepted him as her lover, but to test the sincerity of his love, subjected him to several trials – demanding that he renounce Islam, burn the Qur’ān, drink wine and work for her as a swineherd. He acquiesced to all his beloved’s commands, eventually becoming the model pious heretic of the Sufi religion of love. All of Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry, as I have shown elsewhere, is saturated by this tale.72 In the following lines from ‘Aṭṭār’s account, we hear the Shaykh’s disciples urging him to recant and repent of his blasphemous passion. But to all their entreaties, he makes only flippantly sacrilegious replies:
‘My sheikh,’ urged one, ‘forget this evil sight;
Rise, cleanse yourself according to our rite.’
‘In blood73 I cleanse myself,’ the sheikh replied;
‘In blood, a hundred times, my life is dyed.’
... Another cried: ‘Enough of this; you must
Seek solitude and in repentant dust
Bow down to God.’ ‘I will,’ replied the sheikh,
‘Bow down in dust, but for my idol’s sake.’
And one reproached him: ‘Have you no regret
For Islam and those rites you would forget?’
He said: ‘No man repents past folly more;
Why is it I was not in love before?’74
Eventually, the love-spell cast by the girl was broken and the prayers of his distressed disciples, for months at their wits’ end on how to win the shaykh back into the fold of Islam, were heard. The swine
herd Sufi shaykh awoke from the dream of Christianity. However, soon after he cut off his Christian cincture and headed back with them to Mecca, she pursued him hotly, tragically dying – a Muslim, of course – in his arms.75
Ultimately, the shaykh did ‘repent’ of his love passion, but his repentance was not so much a formal ‘turning back’ as a passage out of exoteric into esoteric Islam – a casting-off of the phantasy of conventional faith for the reality of true devotion. Shaykh Ṣan’ān, having passed through the crucible of erotic romantic passion, experienced a fresh conversion to religion based upon the principles of love. He was no longer the desiccated ascetic Sufi of ere, but a fiery Fedeli d’amore.
The Worship of Wine in the Religion of Love
Classical Persian poems are normally filled with extravagant praise for the cupbearer (sāqī), goblet (sāghar), wine-vat (khum) and drunkenness (mastī), winehouse (maykhāna), tavern (kharābāt), tavern-master (pīr-i kharābāt), and so on. Indeed, many of the clichés and stock metaphors in Persian erotic poetry are bacchanalian,76 with the lover (‘āshiq) usually described as a witless wanderer (parīshān), a headless and footless vagabond (bī-sar u pā), a drunkard (mast), who is constantly intoxicated (mast-i mudām), transported in selfless rapture (bīkhvīshī), ‘out of his mind’ and bereft of self-consciousness (bīhūshī). Such bacchanalian terminology is not personally subjective vagaries that express the poet’s melancholic moods, but actually cognitively precise descriptions that depict exactly the lover’s intoxication during contemplation of the beloved’s beauty, his excitement at imagination of her phantom (khiyāl) and his rapture at the recollection of her beauty previously witnessed in time-before-time on the Day of the pre-Eternal Covenant (rūz-i alast) between man and God.77