Since the reflection of the Beloved’s beauteous countenance is everywhere cast down and reflected in the ‘goblets of phenomena’ throughout the Tavern of the Universe, the lover is always intoxicated and bereft of self in a drunken transport. Loving that absolute Intellectual Beauty, he attains the spiritual station of ‘true idolatry’ (but-parastī-yi ḥaqīqī),78 which is the inner meaning of Ḥāfiẓ’s verse:
The Friend’s reflection cast upon the goblet’s surface
– Her countenance there – in contemplation I’ve witnessed.
Of such timeless drunken pleasure, you are, alas, oblivious.79
Ḥāfiẓ’s ‘timeless drunken pleasure’ is not of the unessential or accidental kind, but rather substantial, since the intoxication it bestows – unlike the drink made from the vine or imbibed through the heady wine of ambition, pride and thoughtlessness is not followed by any hangover or morning-after headache. Hence, it can never be nullified by repentance or by a recovery of sobriety. Those drunk on this wine never commit the sin of becoming teetotallers; as Sa'dī says: ‘no man drunk on that wine served up at the dawn of pre-Eternity becomes sober until vespers are said on the night of the Day of Resurrection.’
This pre-Eternal ‘wine of the Covenant’ (sharāb-i alast), mentioned so often by Sufi fedeli d’amore, refers to the recollection of the pledge that was sealed in pre-Eternity (ahd-i Alast) between the uncreated souls of Adam and their Lord. ‘Am I not your Lord [alastu bi-rabbikum]?’, God asked the yet uncreated souls of Adam’s offspring. In this unconscious and uncreated state, they professed: ‘Yes, we bear witness to it [balā shahidnā]’.80 Humankind’s troth plighted to God in that atemporal moment of Islam’s metahistory comprises the Sufi Religion of Love’s unwritten constitution. What is missing from this narration for the ordinary reader is the fact that the word balā, which means ‘yes’ in the above verse in Arabic, signifies ‘calamity’ as well. The Sufis took the implication of this Arabic linguistic pun very seriously, believing that the human soul in Eternity before its incarnation in time had actually committed itself in advance to undergo all life’s trials and tribulations.
The ‘wine of the Covenant’ that the mystic imbibes thus tastes ‘bitter’, just like the fruit of the vine. Although this wine is quite capable of making a man pass out in a drunken stupor ‘under the table’, as Ḥāfiẓ says,81 its ‘bitterness’ has always been interpreted by the Sufis as an allegory for the pains and troubles man must endure when he mobilizes himself in service to his fellow men. In fact, ‘servitude to mankind’ is both the best description of love’s creed and the best indicator of one’s love for God. All questions posed in Love’s catechism can be answered with one single riposte: ‘Service’.
This ‘bitterness’ was given an even more creative exegesis by the Persian fedeli d’amore, who compared it to relishing the sapiential ‘taste’ of drunken rapture (dhawq-i mastī) in contemplation of the beloved. The pleasure of that vision and their acquiescence to the Beloved’s will cause its whole bitter taste to turn to sweetness, an experience which Sa'dī’s memorable verse celebrates:
For others, the wine of the torments of love
Is gall, but for us, the liquor we imbibe
We take from the hand of the Friend
So it becomes sweet and delicious.82
A number of Ḥāfiẓ’s verses underscore the same bittersweet sentiment:
Although the thorn hurts your spirit, the rose asks pardon
For this wound; the sourness of wine is more easily tolerated
When one remembers the sweet flavour of drunkenness.83
Ḥāfiẓ also boasts of being famed as a drunkard from the very first day of the pre-Eternal Covenant (rūz-i alast),84 and rails against the ascetic who cannot understand that his intoxication with human beauty is a necessary consequence of his vow in pre-Eternity to follow love’s religion:
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.85
Elsewhere, he directs his attention beyond this temporal sphere and speaks of being drunk on the wine of the Covenant:
How blessed is the man who, like Ḥāfiẓ,
Has tasted in his heart the wine made before Adam.86
That wine is exactly the same whose cup-bearer Niẓāmī invokes in his Sāqī-nāma within his romantic epic Sharaf-nāma:
Cast sleep away, O Saki, from your eyes
and pass to lovers who are pure that wine
That is purest claret, which all the schools
of law accept and sanction as divine.
Come, Saki, from the village-elder’s cask
that honey-sweet wine pour into our flask;
Don’t give us wine which legal schools have banned
but wine through which Faith’s principles are crowned.87
Similarly, Ibn Fāriḍ, in a key verse from his Wine Ode, celebrates the ‘sin’ of his drunken bacchanalian adoration of wine as follows:
But they said: ‘You’ve drunk sin!’
No, indeed, I drank only
that whose abstention
is sin to me.88
The Immediate Present Moment (naqd-i waqt) in the Religion of Love
Since love transforms the stuff of the past or future into effects and assets consumed in the present and ‘now’, the devotee of the religion of love lives in the present moment. The lover is always the ‘Child of the Moment’ (ibn al-waqt), as Rūmī put it:
The Sufi is ‘a son of the moment;’
The word mañana is unheard of on the Way.89
The Sufi is ‘a son of the moment;’
In quest of purity he holds the moment close
Like a son clings to his father.90
In his Discourses, Rūmī explains the theosophical doctrine underlying this notion as follows:
Some men look at the beginning, and some men look at the end. These who look at the end are formidable and powerful, for their gaze is fixed on the final issue of things and the world beyond.
Then, there are those who look at the beginning, who are more elect. They say, ‘What need is there for us to look at the end? If wheat is sown at the beginning, barley cannot be reaped in the end, or if barley is sown, wheat shall never be harvested.’ So their gaze is set on the beginning.
There are others who still more elect: they gaze neither upon the beginning nor do they contemplate the end. Being absorbed in God, neither beginning nor end ever enter their minds.91
Since the fedeli d’amore who pursue love’s creed understand the preciousness of the present moment, they know that time must not be wasted in expectation of any future Resurrection. Anyway, for them the Resurrection shall never come since it has already occurred! That is why Ḥāfiẓ rebukes the ascetic for the emptiness of his promise of a future paradise:
When Paradise is mine today as cash in hand,
Why then should I be taken in and count upon
The puritan’s pledge of tomorrow’s kingdom?92
Sa'dī enunciates this same doctrine in one verse:
Eternal youth with its great fortune and felicity
Belongs to he who’s next to you; he’s never had his day;
He knows no age: his home’s in highest heaven.93
Living in the here and now, the lover finds heaven and earth transfigured: he becomes a denizen of heaven. ‘The Resurrection becomes your very état d’âme in the immediate present of Now [naqd-i ḥāl]’,94 as Rūmī puts it. Not only is the Resurrection an immediate experience (naqd-i ḥāl) for him, but all the great events of history – the myths, legends, and the tales of the heroes and saints of yore – are felt as living experiences apprehended in the present. They are not hoary tales of a bygone past. They represent the ready cash and coinage of the lover’s soul, whose shillings and pence he spends here and now. For poets such as Sa'dī and Ḥāfiẓ, the references to the legends of Moses and his revelation on Mt
Sana’i (Qur’ān, VII: 142–5), or the tales of Abraham and the tyrant Nimrud who cast him into the furnace,95 are not simply colourful poetic devices – which the Arabic rhetoricians pedantically categorize as being a ‘proverbial allusion’ (talmīḥ)96 – but actual occurrences within the poet’s soul. This interiorization of religious mythology within the psyche of the poet is reflected in Ḥāfiẓ’s verse about Moses’ vision of God in the Burning Bush:
Here’s pitch black night, there lies the Valley of Peace
Before my feet, so where’s Moses’ light,
Mt. Sanai’s Burning Bush and the promised sight?97
In reference to the story of Abraham being cast into the furnace, likewise Sa'dī says:
Although I’m cast like Abraham into the furnace of
Affliction, it would not matter: glowing with your love
I’d bask among the basil shoots and tulips in your garden.98
All the tales of great lovers and the fables of the heroic champions of yore thus become part of the soul’s psychohistory. They pertain the inner journey of the poet. That is why the epic tales of Firdawsī, the versified romances of Niẓāmī, and ‘Aṭṭār’s story of Shaykh Ṣan‘ān’s infatuation with the Christian girl comprise the stuff of their verse in the here and now. These are not legends, but living facts of the heart that appear constantly in their verse; they are, as Emily Dickinson says, ‘Bulletins all Day from Immortality’. In a single verse, Sa'dī thus summarizes the entire epic romance of Khusraw and Shīrīn by Niẓāmī:
I realized it then, that very first day when
With Shīrīn my affair began: I knew that in
The end, sweet life itself I would abandon.99
As Niẓāmī relates, a beautiful Armenian princess named Shīrīn (‘Sweet one’) was a concubine of the Sasanian monarch Khusraw Parvīz II (reg. 591–628 AD). A stone sculptor called Farhād,100 renowned for his physical prowess, was a rival with the king for her affections. Recognizing the all-consuming nature of his rival’s attachment to his concubine, Khusraw declines to murder him, thinking it more prudent to give his mighty sculptor rival the seemingly impossible task of carving a canal through a mountain to allow for the flow of milk from the pasture to her palace. Even more smugly, Khusraw promised Farhād his concubine as a reward for his efforts should they succeed. When, surprisingly, Farhād meets the challenge and carves out the canal, Khusraw dupes him by telling him that Shīrīn has died, leading Farhād to cast himself off the mountain in despair to his death.
Ḥāfiẓ, in a single verse, summarizes another romantic legend from Firdawsī’s epic (The Book of Kings, Shāh-nāma) as follows:
I have fallen into Patience’s lowest pit
Where, empassioned by the candle of Chigil101
And, enkindled by love’s flame, I have been burnt.
The prince of Turks knows not my good or ill...
Where’s Rustam the champion?102
Ḥāfiẓ here compares his condition with that of the Persian hero Bīzhan, son of Gīv and nephew of Rustam.103 During an adventure in the lands of Turan (Central Asia), Bīzhan encounters Afrāsiyāb’s daughter Manīzha, who falls in love with him. Afrāsiyāb,104 referred to here by the poet as ‘the prince of Turks’, was the most prominent of the Turanian Turkish kings. When he discovers their illicit romance, Afrāsiyāb imprisons the hated Iranian hero Bīzhan in the well of Arzhang. Rustam, the renowned champion of the Iranian forces, eventually goes to Turan in disguise and rescues Bīzhan from the well, bringing Manīzha with him back to Iran.
Likewise, the Sufi poets consider the appearance of Jesus as an ever reoccurring event sustaining them in the present, using in this context the metaphor of the ‘Messiah’s breath of inspiration’ (dam-i masīḥ). Ḥāfiẓ alludes to this in two verses:
Love’s physician is compassionate and endowed
With the breath of Jesus,
But whom should he assuage
If you are without pain?105
To whom may I relate such a subtlety?
She killed me – my stony-hearted mistress,
Yet possessed the life-giving breath of Jesus.106
Since God’s grace is vouchsafed to the lover immediately in the present moment, the supplications and prayers offered up in the Religion of Love are neither to obtain welfare in the present here and now nor salvation in the future life. From the great archangels, whether they be Gabriel or Michael, down to the inhabitants of the fairy kingdom, denizens of the demon empire and the kingdom of the beasts, and then up to Satan’s disobedience and pride, followed by Adam’s sin and later repentance, along with all the graces and calamities sent by Heaven which have been recorded in holy scriptures about past communities – in the Religion of Love such circumstances fill the mystic’s presential awareness. These legends are tangible issues of the present moment that facilitate the lover’s pursuit of Eros, food for his soul that he consumes hoc tempore in the pursuit of knowledge, goodness and beauty, which incite him to excel in the only serious sport: Amor. Thus, for example, referring to Noah’s Ark cast upon the flood, Ḥāfiẓ says:
Don’t desert your mates and quit the ark
Of Noah, Ḥāfiẓ, else this typhoon of
Vicissitudes shall blow your ship to bits.107
Conclusion
From the above review of the doctrine of the Religion of Love in classical Persian poetry, several conclusions may be drawn.
Firstly, it is clear that there is an actual religion – or faith – of love (dīn yā madhhab-i ‘ishq) in Persian mystical literature. The proponents or prophets of this erotic faith comprise some of the greatest poets of the Persian language. They include the likes of Niẓāmī, Sa'dī, Rūmī and Ḥāfiẓ, who have been sent by God-as-Eros, charged with the mission of converting mankind to their philosophy of love.
In the second place, this religion of love is founded on principles of love innate within each human being, in accordance with the original disposition that God instilled within him that prompt him to pursue and love Beauty, Knowledge and Goodness.
Thirdly, this religion is not contrary to the tenets of any of the other divinely revealed religions of mankind. Anyone can become a votary of the religion of love regardless of previous socio-cultural conditioning, for conversion to love’s creed lends new life to the faith which one already has.
Fourthly, this religion’s essential message is one of friendship, affection, peace and living with mutual toleration of others. The tranquillity and peace generated by love’s faith also inculcates such basic values as courtesy, kindness, compassion and mutual respect of others.
Fifthly, the principles of this erotic faith appear in all the world’s advanced cultures whether in East or West. Its prophets feature as the greatest poets, sages and saints of all the oriental and occidental civilizations.
Sixthly and lastly, the religion of love is the universal faith of all existing beings. From a cosmological standpoint, all beings, from the tiniest atom up to the most complex of organisms, all things, whether animate or inanimate, are followers of the religion of love, and ultimately whatever they do is subservient to Love’s command. As Niẓāmī says:
Don’t fall foul and get in trouble
over these living, breathing idols.
They’re demigods, yet worship not
themselves, so follow not their cult.
Each wanders round caught up in a daze,
distracted and dizzy as a compass;
They quest and probe throughout the east and west
to seek the One from whom they’re manifest.108
Notes
1 Man nakhvāham kard tark la‘l-i yār u jām-i may / Zāhidān ma‘dhūr dārīdam ki īnam madhhab-ast. Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 30: 6. All renditions of the poetry in this essay, unless otherwise indicated, are by the translator.
2 Nafīsī (ed.), Muḥīt-i zindigī va aḥwāl u ash‘ār-i Rūdakī, p. 503.
3 ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt Hamadhānī, Tamhīdāt,
p. 22.
4 Tamhīdāt, pp. 114–15.
5 Dīvān-i Ḥakīm Abū’l-Majd Majdūd b. Ādam Sanā’ī Ghaznavī, ed. Mudarris Raḍavī, p. 913. Az kīsh u ṭarīqatam chi pursī? ‘Ishq-ast marā ṭarīqat u kīsh.
6 Rūmī, Kulliyāt-i Shams, ed. Furūzānfar, IV, p. 225, ghazal 1992, v. 21067. I will revisit Rūmī’s teachings on love later on.
7 From his Khusraw u Shīrīn, in Dastgirdī (ed.), Kulliyāt-i Ḥakīm Niẓāmī Ganjavī, p. 95 (12: 2–4).
8 Khusraw u Shīrīn, in ibid., p. 96 (12: 23–5).
9 Khusraw u Shīrīn, in ibid., p. 96 (12: 26–7).
10 See Qur’ān II: 33–4.
11 [For further discussion of dard in ‘Aṭṭār, see Waley, ‘Didactic Style and Self-Criticism in ‘Aṭṭār’, pp. 215–16. Ed./trans.]
12 Manṭiq al-ṭayr, ed. Gawharīn, p. 14, vv. 251–2. See also my introduction to my Guzīda-yi Manṭiq al-ṭayr.
13 The translation featured here is by Sells, Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn ‘Arabi, pp. 72–3; for the original Arabic, see Ibn ‘Arabī, The Tarjumán al-Ashwáq, ed. and trans. Nicholson, Ode XI, p. 19.
14 Translation by Homerin, ‘Umar Ibn al-Fāriḍ: Sufi Verse, Saintly Life, pp. 47, 51.
15 Rūmī, Kulliyāt-i Shams, ed. Furūzānfar, V, p. 58, ghazal 2207, v. 23405. Dar khulāṣa-yi ‘ishq ākhar shīva-yi Islām kū? Dar kushūf-i mushkilātash ṣāḥib-i i‘lām kū?
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 20