In addition to the fact that angels do not know love, Ḥāfiẓ is here referring to the concept of jealousy and offended honour (ghayrat): the lover desires to cut all connections with any other entity and reality than love. In his theoretical treatises on love, Aḥmad Ghazālī explains that at times jealousy in love goes so far as to effect the severance of ties between lover and Beloved, compelling the lover to focus his attention on love alone as his sole focus of worship.40
In other references, Ḥāfiẓ uses bacchanalian imagery to describe the loving relationship between man and his Creator at the moment of creation. The locality in which man is created is compared to a tavern, God’s spirit breathed into man’s body (15:29) is described as wine, and man’s body made of water and clay symbolized by the beaker. In several couplets, angels are shown outside this tavern, denied access to this private moment of creation, but in this example they join in the creation:
Dūsh dīdam ki malā’ik dar-i maykhāna zadand
Gil-i Ādam bisirishtand u bih paymāna zadand.41
Last night, I saw that angels were knocking on the door of the wine-house
Kneading the clay of man and drinking wine.
According to Ḥafiẓ’s commentator Bahā al-Dīn Khurramshāhī, this particular couplet, together with the next two lines of this ghazal, summarizes chapter 4 of the Mirṣād al-‘ibād by Najm al-Dīn Rāzī (d. 654/1256), in which he depicts the workshop of creation as a tavern where the angels have brought the clay of Adam to the divine Vintner who will knead it into the shape of man, which God then ‘perfected into a beautiful form’ (Qur’ān 40:64).42 In this chapter, Rāzī recounts how God orders Gabriel to bring dust from Earth to make the form of man. Rāzī refers to the fact that since man should be able to carry the Trust (amāna), he should have the power over both the worlds, insofar as his soul is from the spiritual world, ‘the supreme height’ (‘alā ‘illī’īn) and his body from the earth, the lowest of the low (asfal al-sāfilīn). God gives the angels, who precede man in the order of being and who have entered the tavern/workshop of being, the task of pouring his clay into the mould of the ‘human form divine’.
Ḥāfiẓ refers several times to God kneading man’s clay before He actually created him (38:72–5). According to mystics, God kneaded man’s clay for 40 continuous days, adding love regularly into the compound so that love became an ineradicable part of man’s nature. In the Dīvān, we find several references to this event. In the next couplet, addressing angels, Ḥāfiẓ emphasizes that God mixed man’s clay with wine in the wine-house of love:
Bar dar-i maykhāna-yi ‘ishq ay malak tasbīḥ-gūy
k-andar ānjā ṭīnat-i ādam mukhammar mīkunand.43
O angel, give praise at the door of love’s wine-house
For inside, they are leavening the clay of mankind.
Using the imperative ‘praise’ in addressing the angels, Ḥāfiẓ highlights the special loving relationship between man and his Creator. Man’s nature is prepared in the wine-house of love to which angels have no access; they should stay outside the door, simply praising God. Several concepts in this couplet are ambiguous. Love (‘ishq) may be a synonym for God, and the wine-house would then be God’s home. The word ṭīnat means literally ‘a bit of clay’, but it also means ‘nature’ or ‘natural disposition’, and mukhammar, literally meaning ‘leavened’ or ‘fermented’, is derived from the root khamr (wine). What Ḥāfiẓ is saying here is that man was created in a secluded place by God’s very hand.
We have already seen how Iblīs refused to prostrate himself before Adam. As a lover of God, who had devotedly worshipped Him, Iblīs became jealous when he witnessed the loving relationship between God and mankind. The story of his disobedience as told by the mystics is complicated by the element that, when the angels bowed before Adam, they saw the image of God in him, thus avoiding the idolatry which Iblīs had said would occur. In one of his couplets, Ḥāfiẓ states:
Malak dar sujda-yi Ādam zamīn-būs-i tu niyyat kard
ki dar ḥusn-i tu chīzī yāft bīsh az ṭawr-i insānī.44
When the angels bowed before Adam, their intention was to kiss the ground before you,
because they saw in your beauty something transcending the human.
One of the reasons God allotted a special position to man was that He Himself instructed the Father of humankind, Adam, in the names and attributes (asmā’ va ṣifāt). All the angels thus accepted man’s special position and prostrated themselves before him. But Iblīs, who was an archangel (malak al-muqarrab), reproached God and proudly considered himself better than man. It would be beyond the scope of this short chapter to explain how, in Persian literature, this proud rebel became viewed as a model of the mystic lover by some, and considered an ‘impostor’ or ‘pretender’ (mudda’ī) by others.45 Like the Sufi mystics, Ḥāfiẓ sees Iblīs as man’s rival and characterizes him with such terms as ‘quarrel-seeker’ (nizā’-jū), ‘egotist’ or ‘selfworshipper’ (khwud-parast), and ‘non-adept’ or ‘non-initiate’ (nā-mahram). Whether because he considered God as the only legitimate Beloved and focus of worship, or because he was jealous of man as a potential ‘rival’ (raqīb), Iblīs quarrelled with God and as a consequence was cursed with eternal separation from Him.46 This is why poets such as Ḥāfiẓ depict Iblīs as an ‘egotist’ or ‘self-worshipper’ (khwud-parast); that is, one unable to understand subtle points of love. Iblīs’ strict monotheism, his boasting of being the only true worshipper of God, led Ḥāfiẓ to consider him as a pretender or impostor:
Mudda’ī khwāst ki āyad ba tamāshāgah-i rāz
dast-i ghayb āmad-u bar sina-i nāmaḥram zad.47
The pretender wanted to come to see the secret spectacle:
an invisible hand appeared and struck the chest of the outsider.48
In the next couplet, the poet underlines again the lofty position of mankind, contrasting it to the loveless nature of angels, personified by Iblīs. The poet advises man not to reveal the secret of love to the pretender, but to leave him to die of the pain of self-worship:
Bā mudda’ī magū’īd asrār-i ‘ishq u mastī
tā bīkhabar bimīrad dar dard-i khwud-parastī.49
Do not tell the pretender the secrets of love and drunkenness,
that he may die not knowing, in the torture of self-worship.
The ‘secrets of love and drunkenness’ refer to the exclusive loving experience of God and mankind, which is commonly described in Persian poetry through wine imagery. What is interesting here is that Iblīs is depicted as a worshipper of himself, whereas man is regarded as the one who is God’s Beloved and bears the secret of love and of drunkenness. It is worth mentioning here that Ḥāfiẓ often uses wine imagery to illustrate this loving encounter between man and God. In such scenes, which have become clichés in Persian love poetry, God is the cup-bearer, His breath is wine, while man’s body is the wine cup.50
Another aspect of the uneasy relationship between man and Iblīs is the latter’s complaint about his treatment at the dawn of creation. Iblīs’ complaint is one of the topoi of Persian mystical literature and many anecdotes recount how Iblīs mourns his condition. Drawing on this rich literature, Ḥāfiẓ refers in the following couplet to Iblīs’ complaint:
Man malak būdam u firdaws-i barīn jāyam būd
Ādam āvard darīn dayr-i kharāb-ābādam.51
I was an angel and lofty Paradise was my place
Adam brought me to this worldly monastery.
In this verse, the former archangel Iblīs refers to his lofty position in the Paradise, describing how he was expelled and fell to the material world because of Adam.
To conclude, as we have seen there definitely does exist a full theory of mystical love which can be reconstructed from the above-mentioned couplets from the Dīvān, and which shows that Ḥāfiẓ had relied heavily on the creation myth elaborated by the Sufi mystics of the preceding centuries. Ḥāfiẓ’s repeated allusions to verses and term
s from the Qur’ān demonstrates his poetic achievement in creating this added mystical – but perhaps the principle and essential – dimension to the doctrine of love in Persian poetry. Combining bacchanalian imagery of wine and erotic love poetry with familiar Qur’ānic traditions and Persian Sufi doctrines, he thus succeeds in interweaving the mystical version of the creation myth with a philosophy of earthly love.
Notes
1 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, p. 950, ghazal 467: 7. All further quotations are from this edition. I would like to thank the editor of this volume for his invaluable comments. I am also grateful to S. McGlinn for his editorial assistance.
2 Analysing the development of ghazal poetry, J.T.P. de Bruijn (‘Anvari and the Ghazal: an Exploration’, p. 31) concludes that poets such as Anvari used ‘different modes of discourse with the ghazal’, highlighting how this development reached its zenith in the hands of Ḥāfiẓ.
3 For the background to the integration of mystical ideas and doctrines in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry, see Manūchihr Murtaḍawī’s classic study on Ḥāfiẓ, Maktab-i Ḥāfiẓ, ya Muqaddama bar Ḥāfiẓ-shināsī, pp. 327–99. See also Dāryūsh Āshūrī’s comparisons of the themes treated by Ḥāfiẓ with Maybudī’s Kashf al-asrār and Najm al-Dīn Rāzī’s Mirṣād al-’ibād, in his Hastī-shināsi-yi Ḥāfiẓ: kāvushī dar bunyādhā-yi andīsha-yi ū: on the development of the concept of love in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry, see pp. 399–422. Also see J.T.P. de Bruijn, Persian Sufi Poetry, III, esp. pp. 76–81, where one of the ghazals of Ḥāfiẓ is analysed.
4 The Mystics of Islam, p. 107.
5 Niẓāmī, Makhzan al-asrār, ed. Dastgirdī, p. 69, l. 16.
6 To give only one example, in the romance Yūsuf va Zulaykhā, ‘Abd al-Rahmān Jāmī gives a splendid description of God’s istighnā in a separate chapter, showing God’s self-sufficiency before the creation of the world. See ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Jāmī, Yūsuf va Zulaykhā, in Mathnavī-yi haft awrang, ed. Mudarris Gīlānī, pp. 591–3. Also see chapter 4 (vādī-yi istighnā) of Farīd ad-Dīn ‘Aṭṭār, Manṭiq al-ṭayr, ed. Gawharīn, in which several aspects of the concept istighnā is illustrated. For an excellent analysis of the structure and function of this poem, see Davis, ‘The Journey as Paradigm: Literal and Metaphorical Travel in ‘Aṭṭār’s Manṭiq aṭ-ṭayr’, pp. 173–83.
7 For an elaborate analysis of the development of the theme of love and the use of the term ‘ishq, see Seyed-Gohrab, Layli and Majnun: Love, Madness and Mystic Longing in Nizāmi’s Epic Romance, chapter 1.
8 See Pourjavady, Ru’yat-i māh dar āsmān, pp. 153ff.; for the use of various terms for love, see Pourjavady’s series of articles in Nashr-i Dānish that appeared under the title ‘Bāda-yi ‘ishq 1–5’, vol. 11, no. 6, 1370, pp. 4–13; vol. 12, no. 1, 1370, pp. 4–18; vol. 12, no. 2, 1370, pp. 6–15; vol. 12, no. 3, 1371, pp. 26–32; vol. 12, no. 4, 1371, pp. 22–30. See Pourjavady, ‘Risāla’ī dar bāra-yi ‘ishq’, pp. 105ff.
9 Sawāniḥ, p. 3, faṣl 1 (3), ll. 18–19.
10 Ibid., p. 5, faṣl 1 (3), ll. 13–16.
11 Aḥmad-i Jām Nāmiqī, Uns at-tā’ibīn, p. 210.
12 See Sūfī-nāma, ed. Yūsufī, pp. 170–3; 208–9.
13 Ibid., pp. 170–1, ll. 18, 1–4.
14 Ibid., p. 173, ll. 3–5.
15 Najm al-Dīn Dāya cites Kharaqānī (d. 450/1034) in his Mirṣād al-‘ibād, ed. Riyāhī, p. 49; English translation by Algar, The Path of God’s Bondsmen, p. 74; all further English references are to this edition and translation. A. Ghazālī quotes Bāyazīd Bistāmī in the Sawāniḥ, ed. Ritter, p. 41, faṣl 21 (4), ll. 18–20; cf. Rūzbihān Baqlī, Sharḥ-i shaṭḥiyyāt, p. 60, l. 22.
16 A. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, p. 295.
17 See A. Ghazālī, Sawāniḥ, p. 4, faṣl 1 (1), l. 6, where the author expresses this thought.
18 For an elaborate discussion on this verse, see N. Pourjavady, ‘‘Ahd-i alast: ‘aqīda-yi Abū Ḥāmid Ghazālī va jāygāh-i tārīkhī-yi ān’, pp. 3–48.
19 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, p. 22, ghazal 3: 4.
20 Qur’ān 95:4.
21 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, p. 938, ghazal 461: 9.
22 Ibid., p. 420, ghazal 202: 7.
23 Najm al-Dīn Dāya, Mirṣād al-’ibād, p. 49; English trans., p. 75.
24 Ibid., p. 2; English trans., p. 26.
25 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, p. 312, ghazal 148: 1.
26 Ibid., p. 424, ghazal 204: 4.
27 Ibid., p. 56, ghazal 20: 5. A variant reading is maqām-i ‘ishq (the station of love).
28 See Bly and Lewisohn, trans., The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door, p. 59.
29 Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, pp. 136–7.
30 Sawāniḥ, pp. 32–3, faṣl 16, ll. 2–7.
31 See Seyed-Gohrab, Layli and Majnun, chapter 5.
32 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, II, p. 1040, l. 1. Although this couplet is taken from a qaṣīda in a worldly context, the mystical import is so strong that it cannot be overlooked.
33 Ibid., p. 374, ghazal 179: 3.
34 Ibid., p. 18, ghazal 1: 5.
35 Ibid., p. 466, ghazal 225: 2. On the term shāhid, see Abū’l-Ḥasan ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Khatmī Lāhūrī, Sharḥ-i ‘irfānī-yi ghazalhā-yi-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khurramshāhī et al., II, p. 1352, on ghazal 192: 1 or vol. II, p. 1386 on ghazal 102: 2; Rajā’ī Bukhārā’ī, Farhang-i ash‘ār-i Ḥāfiẓ, pp. 361ff. Isti‘lāmī, in his Dars-i Ḥāfiẓ: Naqd u sharḥ-i ghazalhā-yi Khwāja Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfiẓ, commenting on ghazals no. 101: 2 (vol. I, pp. 326–7) and no. 346: 1 (vol. II, p. 889), rejects the opinion of some critics that the term shāhid here or anywhere else in the Dīvān – where it occurs some 15 times – refers to a young boy, asserting that ‘in most of the instances it clearly refers to a beautiful woman, and in some other instances it absolutely cannot be interpreted as referring to a young boy with an unshaven face’ (vol. I, p. 54).
36 In Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry, the word shāhid also refers to the Prophet Muḥammad, who existed in eternity in the form of Light and witnessed the creation of the world.
37 Awn, Satan’s Tragedy and Redemption: Iblis in Sufi Psychology, pp. 169ff.; see also Pourjavady, Sulṭān-i ṭarīqat, pp. 45–9; Āshūrī, Hastī-shināsī, pp. 171–80.
38 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, p. 536, ghazal 260: 3.
39 Ibid., p. 312, ghazal 148: 2.
40 For a discussion of the concept of jealousy in combination with malāmat (blame), see Sawāniḥ, faṣl 4.
41 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, p. 374, ghazal 179: 1.
42 Rāzī, Mirṣād al-‘ibād, ed. Riyāḥī, bab II, faṣl 4, pp. 65–82. See Khurramshāhī, Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, II, pp. 766–7.
43 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, p. 404, ghazal 194: 6.
44 Ibid., p. 946, ghazal 465: 5.
45 Ibid., p. 312, ghazal 148: 4. Ḥāfiẓ makes numerous allusions to this aspect of Iblīs in his Dīvān. See Siddīqīyān and Mīr’ābidīnī, Farhang-i vāzhih-namā-yi Ḥāfiẓ s.v. Mudda’ī. Being in the mystical tradition of the Sufi martyr Hallāj, Aḥmad Ghazālī deals briefly with this aspect of Iblīs in chapter 64 of the Sawāniḥ, in which he discusses the aspiration of love (himmat-i ‘ishq). No reference is, however, made here to Iblīs as a pretender, rather his acceptance of God’s curse as a blessing is underscored.
46 See also Lavāyiḥ, ed. Farmanish, pp. 4, 128, a commentary on Aḥmad Ghazālī’s Sawāniḥ, which is wrongly attributed to Nāgawrī.
47 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, p. 312, ghazal 148: 4.
48 Also compare Zangī, Munāẓara-yi chashm u dil, p. 110; Iblīs is repeatedly criticized in ‘Aṭṭār’s works. See, for instance, Manṭiq al-ṭayr, pp. 161–2; see also P. Awn, Satan’s Tragedy, pp. 45–9.
49 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, p. 868, ghazal 426, l. 1.
50 This is the purport, for instance, of the following couplet: Dar azal dādast mā rā sāq
ī-yi la‘l-i labat / jur’a-i jāmī ki man madhūsh-i ān jāmam hanūz. ‘In pre-eternity, the cup-bearer of the ruby of your lips has given us / A draught from a beaker, such that I am drunk with that wine today.’ Ibid., p. 534, ghazal 259: 7.
51 Ibid., p. 636, ghazal 310: 3.
The Radiance of Epiphany: The Vision of Beauty and Love in Ḥāfiẓ’s Poem of Pre-Eternity
Leili Anvar
‘The poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail though meaning still exists.’ (T.S. Eliot1)
In his Dīvān, which for more than six centuries has been a never-ending source of inspiration for scholars and illiterate people alike, Ḥāfiẓ constantly explores those ‘frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail though meaning still exists’, as is confirmed by his poetic title ‘Mouthpiece of the Invisible’ (Lisān al-ghayb). Where words fail – and they constantly do so when what is at stake is the ‘Invisible’ or the realm of inner realities (‘ālam-i bātin) – poetry produces mirror images that reflect what usually cannot be imagined, vocalized or remembered. In the same way that the shimmering mirrorlike surface of the mirror/cup reflects the face of the beauteous Cup-bearer (Sāqī), each ghazal and each image, and line in it, reflects, as successive mirrors/monads,2 a whole world standing beyond the frontiers of consciousness. It could be argued that each line of the Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ is transfused with a beauty cast by this reflection of the Beloved in the same way as, in mystical terms,3 the microcosm reflects the macrocosm.4 Thus, his poetic images reflect both in their form and meaning an echo of the primordial beauty experienced by the human soul in pre-Eternity, when it emerged from nothingness by the command of the Creator.5 The very intricacy of Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry reflects the complexity of the experience of love,6 which in turn is derived from the visual experience of beauty in all its ineffability and the resultant dilemma of integrating the variegated multiplicity of beauty’s reality into a single discourse. Witness the profusion of both literary and mystical commentaries on Hāfiẓ’s verse that cross-reference themselves so intricately, such that it is almost impossible to be simple when you speak of Ḥāfiẓ, precisely because what he has to say (or rather bear witness to) – that is, the complex reality of love – is impossible to recount in plain, simple words. That is also why attempts to paraphrase his verse utterly not only destroy the pervasive ambience of beauty and polysemic haze surrounding it, but also ultimately truncate the meaning of his poems. Maybe that is also why it is so difficult (some would say impossible) to translate Ḥāfiẓ into another language. The choice of poetry as the language of love is the result of the impossibility of expressing such experiences prosaically, a phenomenon that had already been, long before Ḥāfiẓ, chronicled in the writings of Aḥmad Ghazālī (d. 520/1126).7 In his treatise on love entitled Savāniḥ, which is justly considered as the founding text of the School of Love in Sufism and the tradition of love poetry in Persian,8 Ghazālī opens his treatise by emphasizing the impossibility of ever finding words capable of expressing the realities of love:
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 23