Although the imagery of shāhid-bāzī is all-pervasive in Persian poetry, unfortunately there exists no adequate treatment of its erotic theology in any Western language.333 Eve Feuillebois-Pierunek underlines the ambiguity of the practice in her definitive study of Fakhr al-Dīn ‘Irāqī’s (d. 688/1289) erotic theory:
il désigne un jeune homme ou une jeune fille de toute beauté, pris comme miroirs ou ‘témoins’ de la Beauté divine. C’est aussi l’Image de Dieu dans le Coeur: témoin, contemplation et adorateur ne font alors plus qu’un. Certains soufis semblent avoir fait un usage régulier de supports humains de contemplation, et cette attitude est connue sous le nom de shāhid-bāzī, contemplation de la Beauté divine sous un forme humaine.334
In his chapter devoted to the meaning of the term in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry (which covers its usage by the important authorities of the Sufi Path who have written about shāhid/shāhid-bāzī, including ‘Abdu’llāh Anṣārī [d. 482/1089], Qushayrī [d. 465/1074] and Rūzbihān Baqlī [d. 606/1210]), Aḥmad ‘Alī Rajā’ī Bukhārā’ī reveals that ‘in the Sufi lexicon, the Witness signifies both “the Absolute Good” and “Fair-faced” at once, with the connotation that the shāhid is one who bears “witness” to God’s artifice’.335 In this regard, Sufis often referred to the renowned saying of the Prophet: ‘Indeed, God is beautiful and loves beauty.’336 Alluding to this ḥadīth, while commenting on the Sufi poet Kamāl Khujandī’s doctrine of shāhid-bāzī (Ḥāfiẓ’s and Kamāl’s erotic teachings are essentially identical), the Sufi hagiographer Ibn Karbalā’ī explains, ‘Dhū’l-Nūn the Egyptian said: ‘Whoever becomes an intimate of God becomes intimate with every beautiful thing [shay’ malīḥ], every beautiful face [wajh ṣabīḥ], every beautiful form and every delectable fragrance [rā’iḥa ṭayyiba].’337 The king of lovers and gnostics, Shaykh Abū Muḥammad Rūzbihān al-Baqlī pronounced: ‘The inner aspect of the realm of divinity [lāhūt] is effortlessly incarnated in the realm of humanity [nāsūt], and the realm of humanity in turn reflects the beauty of the realm of divinity.’338
The reflection of divinity within humanity, described here by Rūzbihān, was based on the Sufi mystico-erotic doctrine that taught, similar to Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium,339 that love always pursues wholeness and is essentially the desire of lover and beloved to merge into one. Under the sway of the divine theophany, the mystic’s individual identity could virtually melt into that of his theophanic Witness, as ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt Hamadānī (executed 526/1132: a disciple of Aḥmad Ghazālī) explains:
The love of the contemplated Object/Witness [shāhid] becomes one with the divine contemplated Subject [mashūd], causing shāhid and mashūd to merge into one. You imagine this to be incarnationism [ḥulūl], yet it is not. It is the quintessence of mystical oneness [ittiḥād], and according to the religion of the Verifiers [madhhab-i muḥaqqiqān], no other religion exists. Have you ever heard these verses?
Anyone whose life does not rest
upon that Idol, that Witness-of-Beauty,
is no devotee, nor man of true austerity
in the faith of infidelity.
Infidelity is that you yourself
become that Witness-of-Beauty.
If infidelity is such as this
No one else exists in unicity.340
If ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt’s statement gives a taste of the sophisticated antinomian theological doctrine sustaining this art of erotic contemplation, the following passage from a work by Quṭb al-Dīn al-‘Abbād (d. 547/1152) contains the most revealing description of the spiritual psychology underlying its actual practice:
It should be understood that in Sufi terminology there are many different sorts of (implications to the term) shāhid. The shāhid is that thing found to be acceptable to the eyes of the heart. It is an interior spiritual reality [ma‘nā] that becomes attached to heart such that the heart beholds it in all its states, seeking deeper intimacy with it by envisioning it [bi-dīdār-i ū uns talabad], and the shāhid is one who ‘bears witness’. Therefore, that which the spiritual wayfarer’s heart becomes intimately attached to beholding, and which it contemplates in all its contemplative moments, such that that thing attests and bears witness to the soundness of its presential awareness-of-heart – that thing is the shāhid. As long at wayfarer languishes and longs for the sight of it, he is a spectator or observer [mashāhid], but as soon as by way of contemplative absorption and annihilation, he loses all personal qualification of self, drowning in the essence of the shāhid, he becomes a ‘martyr’ [shahīd: lit. ‘one who has borne witness for his faith’].
So whatever the wayfarer’s heart hangs upon is his shāhid, whether this be a phenomenal form [ṣūrat], a song [āwāz], a verse, an idea, or a moment of meditation [waqt]. As for one who makes his shāhid out to be a beautiful face or a child, there is no warrant for this on the Sufi Path [ni ḥukm-i ṭarīqatī-ast]; rather, this belongs to the after-effects of the powers of concupiscence [quwwa-yi shawat]. In this fashion whenever the heart resolves to pursue its ‘invisible Witness of Beauty’ [shāhid-i ghaybī], and the base passional soul [nafs-i ammara] is unable to apprehend that Reality for itself, it attaches itself to a form in this visible phenomenal world, thus becoming bound and attached to a certain ‘pretty face’ which is an image of the divine workmanship, and that thing they call the shāhid.341
As this extraordinarily profound passage teaches, the Sufi’s love of God is, psychologically speaking, nolens volens, couched in the terminology of human erotic relationships. Thus, while the shāhid is both ‘an interior spiritual reality’ through which the mystic experiences intimacy with the Divine, the reflection of that ‘reality’ can also become manifest in any mundane phenomenon, be it a person, song, verse of poetry or meditative mood. ‘One is always in love with something or other’, the Romantic poet Shelley admitted, ‘the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits encased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal’.342
This refined amatory psychology obtained its most sophisticated elaboration in the Sawāniḥ al-‘ushshāq (‘The Lovers’ Experiences’), written by Aḥmad al-Ghazālī (d. 520/1126), younger brother of Islam’s great Sunni-Sufi theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111). In this short treatise, the first treatise on erotico-mystical love in the Persian language, Ghazālī describes the various erotic appearances of the beloved as constituting ‘the physiognomy or intuitive discernment of love [firāsat-i ‘ishq]’. The lover must have enough discernment and a sufficient understanding of physiognomy to recognize the physical appearances of the beloved in this world. ‘Each of these [appearances]’, states Ghazālī, ‘lies upon the path of the lover’s intuitive discernment through love; each of them is an expression of his spiritual or physical quest, or else some ill-aspect or deficiency in his quest. This is because love manifests certain signs beneath and behind the many veils that becurtain it, each of the spiritual realities [ma‘ānī] is a sign of love that is displayed through the [semi-diaphanous] curtain of imagination [parda-yi khiyāl].’343
The true shāhid, says Ḥāfiẓ, is not simply a girl possessed of a ‘slender waist and beautiful hair’ – that is, some sexually attractive woman (or man) – but one whose beauty incarnates a certain ineffable je ne sais quoi that is described by Sufis as the metaphysical ‘mystery-of-beauty’ (ān):
The beloved is not one with beautiful hair or a slender waist;
Be the slave of that radiant face which has a mystery-of-beauty.344
By his elucidation of the metaphysics of the erotic theology sustaining the Sufi contemplative experience in the Sawāniḥ, Aḥmad Ghazālī established himself as a – if not the – founder of the literary topos and mystical persuasion that later came to be known as the ‘religion of love’ (madhhab-i ‘ishq) in Islamic Sufism. In Ghazālī’s Sawāniḥ, in ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt’s Tamhīdāt – and two centuries later, in the Dīvāns of Sa‘dī, Awḥad al-Dīn Kirmānī, Ḥāfiẓ
and Kamāl Khujandī – shāhid-bāzī became featured as one of the key contemplative disciplines of this new, challenging and radical Religion of Love. Following Ghazālī’s lead, the erotic vocabulary of Sufi poetry came to be characterized by a parabolic quality, the result of a studied ambiguity which involved a reserve of meaning beyond the comprehension of the average intelligence. Exactly like the trobar clus poetry of the troubadours of Italy during this epoch, in classical Persian prose and poetry devoted to the art of erotic contemplation (shāhid-bāzī), it became virtually impossible to distinguish between the metaphysics of the spirit and the erotics of the flesh. The art historian A. Papadopoulo refers to this perspective as expressing an ‘aesthetic of ambiguity’,345 a viewpoint suggesting, as John Renard points out, that ‘the work does not coerce the viewer into attaching any one spiritual meaning to the form ... the viewer cannot always say for certain which painters, for example, intended their scenes of lovers in a paradisal garden to be taken as visions of heavenly reality, and which wanted the viewer to see merely an earthly picnic’.346 Ghazālī’s explicitly erotic vocabulary – couched in symbolic allusions (ishārāt) to describe the ambigious experience of love, whether sexual or sacral – was developed and enriched by his later Sufi followers, particularly Rūzbihān Baqlī of Shīrāz (d. 606/1210), whose views on ‘beauty-worship’ (jamāl-parastī)347 were a key influence on Sa‘dī’s theoerotic verse.348 Ḥāfiẓ was certainly familiar with Rūzbihān’s views, and may have even been attached to his Sufi order.349
The most famous Persian Sufi teacher who made the erotic theology of shāhid-bāzī the foundation of his doctrine was Awḥad al-Dīn Kirmānī (d. 635/1238). In Kirmānī’s Sufi tradition of erotic spirituality, a tradition to which Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān directly belongs, human love forms a bridge across which every seeker necessarily must fare to reach the farther – divine – shore. This idea was encapsulated in an Arabic maxim: ‘The phenomenal form is a bridge to the supra-formal Reality [al-majāz qanṭarat al-ḥaqīqat].’350 Kirmānī’s verses gives a good summary of the basic doctrine of shāhid-bāzī:
Our soul’s an infant on the Way;
The Witness is its nurse. To sport
And play with the Witness always is
What gives the soul its sustenance.
These fair forms that you contemplate
Are not themselves that lovely Witness:
They are just shadows cast from it.351
The practice of mystic-lovers such as ‘Irāqī and Kirmānī, explains Jāmī apologetically in his biography of the latter, ‘was that they always engaged in the scrutiny of the phenomenal forms of sensory beauty and by medium of those forms they contemplated the beauty of God Almighty’.352 The contemplative discipline of shāhid-bāzī, as these verses and Jāmī’s remarks about their author demonstrate, constitutes the main practice of the rind’s romantic religion, a practice of course completely at odds with conventional Muslim ethics confined within the boundaries of a priggish moral code based on the artificial and ultimately – the ontologically unreal – sacred/profane dichotomy.353 The moral probity of the practice was left to depend entirely on the beholder’s subjective viewpoint.354 If he practised the discipline properly, the seer shāhid-bāz would be graced with a vision of the Sublime and divine through contemplation of fair faces (rū-yi khubān) which, though ostensibly ungodly and mundane, could be viewed as being a ‘divine creation’ (sun‘-i khudā-y).355 The human form beheld in selfless ecstasy becomes a ‘theophanic witness’ (gender is always ambiguous in Persian, but in Ḥāfiẓ’s verse the Witness is nearly always female356). The inspired libertine’s selfless gaze357 on heavenly beauty in the mirror of earthly phenomenal forms invariably invites the condemnation of the prim, prudish guardians of the Muslim moral law. In the following verse, Ḥāfiẓ addresses the angry Sufi shaykh who reproached him for pursuit of romantic love, giving this formalist foe of his a robust riposte:
I am not about to abandon love, nor the secret Witness,
Nor the cup of wine. I have sworn off these things
A hundred times, and I won’t do it again.358
Unlike Christian theological doctrine, which distinguishes strictly between divine agape and human eros, holding the second to be a debased form of the first and only indulged at the expense of the former, in Ḥāfiẓ’s metaphysics of love there is little or no differentiation between earthly human and heavenly divine love. In Ḥāfiẓ’s erotic imagery, as Eric Schroeder observed, ‘there is a changing relationship and a constant connection between the erotic and the metaphysical ... his erotic is not sentimental but charged with physical reality and an incipient metaphysical penetration which allows of a strange and wide-flung rhetoric in which the bodily and the cosmic lie together entangled’.359 Indeed, as Ḥāfiẓ provocatively challenges: ‘What will anyone who has not nibbled on the apple within the chin of the beautiful Witness understand of the fruits of Paradise?’360 – romantic love forms a wonderful bridge to Divine Eros. The ambiguity of such erotic imagery could be fully exploited by the use of double entendre or amphibology (īhām) by Religion-of-Love poets – a poetic device of special significance in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetics.361 Erotic contemplation thus became a kind of religious injunction among the poets of this school such as Awḥad al-Dīn Kirmānī, Sa‘dī,362 Khwājū, Kamāl Khujandī, and particularly Ḥāfiẓ, who enjoined it with pontifical tones throughout his Dīvān:
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.363
According to the tenets of Ḥāfiẓ’s erotic spirituality (I cite here Lāhūrī’s marvellous exegesis of this verse):
the adept should not seek the grace of anyone but the human figurative beloved [ma‘shūq-i majāzī] and human love [maḥabbat-i majāzī] since she is a vehicle by means of which one attains union to the True Beloved [ma‘shūq-i ḥaqīqī] and True Love [maḥabbat-i ḥaqīqī]; by the intermediary means of the figurative human beloved and human love one may unite oneself with the True Beloved and experience True Love – for (as the Arabic adage goes) ‘the figurative is a bridge to the Real’ ... It is a grave error to kiss the hand of and pledge oneself to those who sell their ascetic abstinence for the sake of riches, worldly rank and status.364
In this fashion, the malāmatī lover’s adherence to the creed of romantic love and practice of the art of erotic contemplation served as an antidote to the blame and hatred that he invariably incurred from Muslim pharisees.
The Erotic Gaze: Contemplation of Human Beauty sub specie aeternitatis (naẓar-bāzī)
A complementary aspect of the erotic contemplation of the inspired libertine in Ḥāfiẓ’s verse is the poetic genre of the theoerotics of the eye, in which the poet casts a playful regard on beauty (naẓar-bāz) and beholds the divine in the mirror of human beauty insofar as the latter bears ‘witness’ (shāhid) to the former. Ḥāfiẓ refers to this key-concept in various constructions365 altogether ten times in the Dīvān. In the three out of four instances the term naẓar-bāz is associated with the word ‘inspired libertine’ (rind) and/or the word ‘lover’ (‘āshiq),366 and in all five instances where he refers to his infatuation with ‘the sport of the visual regard’ and boasts of playing the ‘game of glances’ (naẓar-bāzī), he characterizes the practice as being one of the lover’s foremost accomplishments.367 In one of these instances, when speaking about the ambiguous metaphysical gaze that contemplates physical human beauty, Ḥāfiẓ boasts:
I am a lover and a libertine, a player of
The game of glances with eyes that gaze in love.
Such myriad arts and skills are my ornament:
I say it plain – in fact, I show it off.368
His contemplative regard for human beauty (naẓar-bāzī) is ‘an art of particular significance to Ḥāfiẓ, a key term in the poetry of which he boasts in many verses’,369 as Khurramshāhī informs u
s. Translated here as ‘game of glances with eyes that gaze in love’, naẓar-bāzī means literally ‘playing with one’s glance’, ‘to cast a flirtatious glance upon’ or ‘to capriciously regard mortal beauty’. It is the gaze of the mystic who engages in the ‘Witness Game’ (shāhid-bāzī). Ḥāfiẓian aesthetics dictates the sacrality of human love and beauty, for as Lāhūrī in his commentary pronounces: ‘It is only through the forms of mortal beauty [suwar-i husniyya] that God-as-Absolute in reality can attract the hearts of lovers to Himself.’370 Explaining the contemplative technique of his erotic gaze, Lāhūrī comments that ‘the gnostic of Shīrāz [Ḥāfiẓ] spent most of his time absorbed in contemplation of the True Beauty [jamāl-i Ḥaqīqī]’, and for this purpose resorted to regarding the appearances of figurative human beauty [tawaṣṣul bih maẓāhir-i ḥusniyya-yi majāzī] ... his eyes preoccupied in contemplation of the True Beauty [jamāl-i ḥaqīqī] through the veil of the appearances of these moon-faced ladies’.371 Thus, to be human is to ‘regard’ human beauty, the measure of humanity lying in the capacity to love and to experience the erotic in all its degrees human and divine, according to the Religion-of-Love poets.372
With this brief introduction into the two key contemplative disciplines of Ḥāfiẓ’s erotic spirituality, we are now in a better position to re-examine the amatory psychology of the wild romantic rind who incarnates their practice.
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 11