Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

by Leonard Lewisohn

  29 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 379: 6.

  30 Būstān-i Sa‘dī, ed. Yūsufī, III, v. 1904.

  31 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 379: 1–2.

  32 Ibid., ghazal 290: 8.

  33 Ibid., ghazal 107: 11.

  34 Ibid., ghazal 175: 5.

  35 Ibid., ghazal 358: 2.

  36 Ibid., ghazal 405: 4.

  37 Ibid., ghazal 353: 5.

  38 Ibid., ghazal 7: 2.

  39 Ibid., ghazal 49: 1.

  40 Ibid., ghazal 165: 3.

  41 Ibid., ghazal 186: 5.

  42 Ibid., ghazal 7: 1.

  43 Ibid., ghazal 215: 7.

  44 Ibid., ghazal 441: 5.

  45 Ibid., ghazal 255: 8.

  46 Ibid., ghazal 267: 3.

  47 Mafātīḥ al-i‘jāz fī sharḥ-i Gulshan-i rāz, ed. Khāliqī and Karbāsī, pp. 478–9, vv. 788–9.

  48 Kay tā bā khwudī dar khwudat rāh nīst/ vazīn nukta juz bīkhwud āgāh nīst. Būstān, ed. Yūsufī, chap. 3, v. 1904, p. 111.

  49 Gulshan-i rāz, vv. 417–24, in Shabistarī, Majmū‘a-i āthār-i Shaykh Maḥmūd Shabistarī, ed. Muwaḥḥid, p. 84.

  50 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 20: 5.

  51 ‘Le Secret et le Paradoxal en literature mystique persan: réflexion sur deux aspects fondamentaux de la mystique irano-islamique’, p. 5.

  52 Ibid., p. 5.

  53 Ibid., p. 13.

  54 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ghazal 437: 2.

  55 Ibid., ghazal 373: 4.

  56 Shujā, Anīs al-nās, ed. Īraj Afshar, XVI–424pp., facsim.

  57 Ibid., p. 151.

  58 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 26: 3 (trans. Robert Bly and Leonard Lewisohn).

  59 Ibid., ghazal 366: 1.

  60 Ibid., ghazal 270: 2.

  61 Ibid., ghazal 431: 3.

  62 Ibid., ghazals 239: 3; 247: 6; 270: 2.

  63 Ibid., ghazal 445: 8.

  64 Ibid., ghazal 481: 6.

  65 Ibid., ghazal 265: 4.

  66 Ibid., ghazal 468: 5.

  67 Ibid., ghazal 269: 4.

  68 Ibid., ghazal 479: 2.

  69 Ibid., ghazal 348: 6.

  70 An allusion to ghazal 264: 3.

  71 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 329: 7.

  72 Ibid., ghazal 318: 4.

  73 Ibid., ghazal 273: 6.

  74 Ibid., ghazal 148: 1–2.

  75 Ibid., ghazal 20: 5.

  76 Ibid., ghazal 148: 4.

  77 Ibid., ghazal 114: 8.

  78 Ibid., ghazal 7: 1–2.

  79 Ibid., ghazal 27: 4.

  80 Ibid., ghazals 87: 2; 481: 6.

  81 Ibid., ghazal 156: 5.

  82 Ibid., ghazals 189: 3; 200: 1.

  83 Ibid., ghazals 190: 2; 221: 1; 392: 3.

  84 Ibid., ghazal 385: 4.

  85 Ibid., ghazal 5: 1.

  86 Ibid., ghazal 183: 1.

  87 Ibid., ghazal 461: 1.

  88 Ibid., ghazal 267: 1.

  89 Ibid., ghazal 330: 5.

  90 Ibid., ghazal 325: 6.

  91 Ibid., ghazal 483: 3.

  92 Ibid., ghazals 238: 3; 327: 7.

  93 Ibid., ghazal 281: 7.

  94 Ibid., ghazal 170: 6.

  95 Ibid., ghazal 256: 2.

  96 Ibid., ghazal 271: 7.

  97 Ibid., ghazal 238: 5.

  98 Ibid., ghazal 333: 7.

  99 Ibid., ghazal 275: 9.

  100 Ibid., ghazal 223: 5.

  101 Ibid., ghazal 351: 7.

  102 Ibid., ghazal 87: 5–6.

  103 Ibid., ghazal 201: 3.

  The Religion of Love and the Puritans of Islam: Sufi Sources of Ḥāfiẓ’s Anti-clericalism

  Leonard Lewisohn

  Mise-en-scène

  There exists a strong tradition of parody and satire of religious dignitaries among the Persian poets that can be traced back to the early Seljuk period,1 which makes it possible to speak of anti-clericalism in Islam as simultaneously a social phenomenon, literary topos and spiritual attitude. Although caricature and castigation of figures belonging to both the esoteric Sufi and exoteric clerical hierarchy appear among nearly all classical Persian poets – Sanā’ī, ‘Aṭṭār, Nizārī Quhistānī and ‘Ubayd Zakānī in particular – Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān is unique in being almost entirely anti-clerical in composition. 2 In fact, one may say that his poems are as virulently anti-clerical as the communist poetry of Vladimir Mayakowsky and Nazim Hikmat in early twentieth-century Russia and Turkey are rabidly anti-capitalist. Yet Ḥāfiẓ’s anti-clericalism comprises not simply socio-political criticism with a religious veneer. It represents his own original, hypersophisticated psychological re-evaluation of religious ideas and values, the literary and religious sources of which are directly derived from Sufi ethical and metaphysical doctrines, as well as teachings taken from the Qur’ān and ḥadīth, not to mention several other sources. Below, my focus of concern will be on the Sufi and other spiritual sources of his anti-clerical poetics, and in particular two characters in his lexicon: the sanctimonious Muslim pharisee or puritan ascetic (zāhid); and his nemesis: the Inspired Libertine (rind).3

  The Graceless Zealot and the Creed of Love

  For Modes of Faith, let graceless zealots fight;

  His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.

  Alexander Pope4

  Without exception, all members of the Muslim ‘clergy’5 of Ḥāfiẓ’s day evoke his scorn and satire. The stock characters in the poet’s anti-clerical lexicon include the Preacher (wā‘iẓ), Sufi Shaykh (shaykh), Judge (qāḍī) and the Lawyer or Jurist (faqīh). But the most reviled and villainous personality, the nightmare obsession of the whole of Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān, is the Ascetic (zāhid), who exemplifies the Muslim Pharisee par excellence. The zāhid in England and New England from the sixteenth century down to the early eighteenth century was called a ‘Puritan’, ‘Precisian’ or ‘Formalist’, and in popular parlance today the newspapers normally dub him an ‘extremist’ or ‘religious fundamentalist’.6 Ḥāfiẓ refers altogether 36 times in his Dīvān to this Puritan zāhid. In each instance his tone of one of parody or sarcasm, voicing reproach, contempt, disdain or scorn.7 At the same time, his strictures against asceticism and the ascetic philistine mentality are not waves lapping at the shores of hedonism. On the contrary, an ascetic eschewing of worldly materialism permeates Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry. Ascetic renunciation (zuhd) as a spiritual ideal still held its place in his thought, as it did among Sufi poets whom he often emulated.8

  Ḥāfiẓ’s criticism of asceticism is directed at the lifeless formalism and the desiccated loveless piety of its heartless ‘Muslim’ practitioners. Exactly like the ideologically committed clerics of Saudi Arabia or the hardline ayatollahs devoted to the mint, anise and cummin (Matthew 23:23) of the sharī‘a-oriented religion of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ḥāfiẓ’s Pharisee-ascetic, being insensible to Eros, professes a philistine ignorance of the paradoxes of erotic spirituality and the passions of apophatic theology. The ascetics’ loveless nature had been a proverbial theme in Persian poetry from the time of Sanā’ī (d. 525/1131) at least,9 but Ḥāfiẓ’s antinomian verse seems single-mindedly dedicated to exposing the lack of practice of these puritans (whether they be the shaykh, zāhid, faqīh, qāḍī or wā‘iẓ); indeed, their lack of knowledge of Amor. In one place, Ḥāfiẓ taunts the ascetic:

  Puritan! If once our witness of divine beauty in earthly

  Form10 display herself to you, you’d never yearn again

  For anything else but for wine and women.11

  Elsewhere, he stigmatizes his prudishness:

  The sign of the man of God is being a lover.

  Keep this secret to yourself – since I see no such sign

  In any of these shaykhs in this town!12

  Benighted in matters erotic, in his gravity the ascetic takes pride. The narrow-minded and vain nature of Ḥāfiẓ’s pretentious puritan bears comparison with Angelo, the over-strict de
puty of the state in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, the character of which is described as being ‘like a good thing being often read, grown sere and tedious’.13 A century later in English literature we again encounter this same archetypal zāhid, in the characters of Formalist and Hypocrisy in Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1628–88). These two ‘gentlemen’, who were ‘born in the land of Vain-glory’, are reproached by Christian (hero of Bunyan’s allegory) for proceeding without God’s grace and mercy on the spiritual path, and berated for following ‘the rude workings of your fancies’. Formalist and Hypocrisy, who cannot grasp that by obedience to ‘laws and ordinances you will not be saved’, finally arrive at the foot of Mt Difficulty. But instead of taking the narrow way that lay up that hill – ‘the steep and high path’ that leads to Mt Sion – they took byways to the left and right of the hill, ways that culminated in Danger and Destruction, where both perished.14 Alluding to the Ascetic–Puritan’s benighted understanding of the realm of the Spirit, in the following verse Ḥāfiẓ delivers a sort of Persian Sufiesque reprise to Christian’s reproach to Formalist and Hypocrisy:

  If the zealous puritan never found the way

  To penetrate into Romance’s universe, it’s well –

  He’s forgiven – since Love’s a business that hinges

  On inculcation and tutelage.15

  Exactly like those two other stock characters in Ḥāfiẓ’s repertoire, the Counsellor and the Shaykh,16 the zāhid, while extroverted in his formalist rites of piety, is full of censorious zeal, dogmatically railing at and cursing his fellow Muslims because they differ from him in ceremonies and phrases. Ḥāfiẓ pours scorn and ridicule on both of these formalist figures:

  The counsellor spoke contemptuously to me;

  He said: ‘Wine is forbidden, period.’ ‘I agree

  With you,’ I said. ‘Also I don’t listen to every jackass.’

  The angry shaykh said, ‘Go, don’t stay here.

  And give up love.’ ‘There’s no need, brother

  For a fight here; I simply won’t do that.’17

  To mock the ascetic, Ḥāfiẓ backhandedly compliments him as being a ‘reasonable’ man in one verse,18 but one must remember that in the poet’s religion, obedience to ‘lunatics’ constitutes the sole sign of religious faith:

  Above homage and obeisance to lunatics

  Do not seek for more from us, for our sect’s master

  Professed all intellectualism to be wickedness.19

  By way of poetic allusion (talmīḥ), the ‘master’ of Ḥāfiẓ’s ‘sect’, who thought intellectualism was wickedness and sin, here refers historically to Luqmān Sarkhasī, one of the greatest wise fools in the history of Persian Sufism and the master of the ascetic–libertine Sufi sage Abū Sa‘īd ibn Abī’l-Khayr (357/967–440/1048).20 Since in Ḥāfiẓ’s faith, ‘mad love alone comprises the way to union with the Beloved, traversing the Path by means of reason is necessarily sinful’.21 The puritan ascetic is, on the other hand, a sophomoric fool, the archetypal idiot who believes himself wise, whose character is again depicted by another of Shakespeare’s puritans: the sanctimonious steward Malvolio in Twelfth Night, described as ‘a pedant that keeps a school i’th’ church’.22 All such pretension is despised in Ḥāfiẓ’s creed of love, whence the poet advises:

  Don’t kiss anything except the sweetheart’s lip

  And the cup of wine, Ḥāfiẓ; friends, it’s a grave mistake

  To kiss the hand held out to you by a Puritan.23

  Alluding to some of the central doctrines of his theology of love, he contrasts his own passionate engagement in the Faith of Love (madhhab-i ‘ishq) to the desiccated Muslim piety of ‘the reasonable ascetic’ (zāhid-i ‘āqil):

  The hot brand which we have pressed onto

  Our lunatic hearts is so intense it would set fire

  To the straw piles of a hundred reasonable ascetics.24

  Here, he has in mind a type of religious pedant, whose pedantry consists not merely in a narrow-minded interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence, but in intolerance for, and ignorance of, the higher religion of Eros.25 This verse expresses the classic distinction in Sufi religious phenomenology between love and reason ‘the contrast’, as Annemarie Schimmel points out, ‘between nomos-oriented religion and eros-oriented religion. On the one hand, we find a religion which is bound by the law and where the law, the sharī‘a – and ... the ‘aql, intellect – leads human beings on a strictly prescribed way in which salvation is guaranteed, God-willing of course; and, on the other hand, the Sufi way of feeling, of experiencing the immediate presence of God already here and now.’26 Ḥāfiẓian aesthetics dictates the sacrality of human love and beauty. In his religion of love all mortal beauty reflects and exemplifies divine loveliness, since only in the mirror of the former can the latter be contemplated. But the loveless ascetic, who doesn’t understand how and why it is that the wine of divine beauty must be served up in the cup of human love and loveliness, always rejects love’s creed, and so only evokes Ḥāfiẓ’s derision:

  Oh ascetics, go away. Stop arguing with those

  Who drink the bitter stuff, because it was precisely

  This gift the divine ones gave us in pre-Eternity.27

  Fault-finding and the Ascetic’s Blinkered Religious Zeal

  In Ḥāfiẓ’s lexicon the ascetic (zāhid) is also synonymous with a kind of undeveloped or degenerate religious piety.28 A puritan with a rigidly literal exoteric religious persuasion, he is the polar opposite of the unconventional, inspired libertine or pious rake (rind). Caricatures of his unpleasant nature – ill-natured, censorious and supercilious towards any others whom he considers to be of less devout nature – abound in Persian literature, alongside depictions of his self-aggrandizing display of piety and manipulation of faith for social advancement. Writing in Shīrāz a century before Ḥāfiẓ, Sa‘dī relates the story of an ascetic who was invited to be the guest of a prince. At the royal banqueting table he ate less than was his custom, and after the meal he recited public prayers longer than was his habit at home. Upon returning home, the ‘ascetic’ asked his son to bring him something to eat.

  ‘I had supposed you had eaten to satiety already at the King’s table’, the boy wondered aloud.

  ‘Well, it seemed more to my benefit to curb my appetite there’, his father prevaricated.

  Discerning that his father’s hypocritical pretence to abstention had eradicated all his claim to ascetic virtue, the lad quipped: ‘Then recite your prayers over again as well for your good works up to now have also reaped no benefit for you.’29

  As one can see from this vignette, as a stock character in Persian folklore the ascetic signifies spurious sanctity and specious piety,30 which is why Ḥāfiẓ sarcastically counsels the puritan ascetic:

  Don’t worry so much about the rogues and rakes,

  You high-minded Puritans. You know the sins of others

  Will not appear written on your own foreheads anyway.31

  The poet’s ironic caricature of the ascetic as ‘high-minded’32 has a double edge, for one who is ‘high-minded’ should always be forgiving, overlooking others’ peccadilloes – never by definition intentionally censorious. But the ascetic suffers from what the great Anglican contemplative poet Isaac Watts (1674–1748), in his superb analysis of ‘the abuse of religious emotions’, diagnosed as ‘unrighteous indignation’. Watts describes certain evangelical zealots of his day, ‘who when convinced that such and such a practice is culpable or unlawful ... condemn it as inconsistent with true salvation ... as if it were blasphemy or idolatry ... and are ready to break into stern speeches and railing accusations against all who practice it, and pronounce them apostates and sinners of the first rank.’33

  This misplaced zeal to rectify his neighbours’ faults on the part of the ascetic, like Watts’ Christian zealots and like the Scribes and Pharisees of the Gospels, prevents him from casting the beam out of his own eye for beholding the mote in his brother’
s.34 In a brilliant parody on mountebank clerics in Cromwell’s Reformation England, Samuel Butler (1612–80), in his satirical poem Hudibras, likewise furnishes us with the perfect cultural analogy to the conduct of the hypercritical zāhid in Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān. Butler criticizes these Pharisetical clerics as being ‘A sect whose chief devotion / lies In odd perverse antipathies, / In falling out with that or this / And finding somewhat still amiss.’ Their obsession in always ‘finding something still amiss’35 finds an exact reprise in Ḥāfiẓ’s scorn for his ascetic’s penchant for fault-finding. May the sanctimonious ascetic be repaid in kind for his fault-finding, Ḥāfiẓ prays, supplicating that the ‘hot air’ of his religious pronouncements – literally ‘the pall of his sighs’ (dūd-i āhash) – befuddle his hyper-critical vision:

  Oh Lord, this egotistical ascetic, whose sights are always fixed on other’s flaws

  And faults – Cloud the mirror of his mind with the vapour of his sighs!36

  Coleridge’s paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13:6–7 in this context springs to mind:

  A wrong done to thee think a cat’s eye spark

  Thou wouldst not see, were not thine own heart dark.

  Thine own keen sense of wrong that thirsts for sin,

  Fear that – the spark self-kindled from within.37

  Ḥāfiẓ’s condemnation of fault-finding is not his own personal idiosyncrasy, but is exactly in line with the teachings of the Persian futuwwat tradition, where this vice is consistently condemned by most of its foremost thinkers,38 and also echoes a number of verses in Rūmī’s Mathnawī reviling the evils of exposing the flaws of one’s neighbour (‘ayb-jū’ī).39 The key verse that best encapsulates Ḥāfiẓ’s teaching on the vice of fault-finding is: