The following words comprise some chapters dealing with the significations of love (ma‘ānī-yi ‘ishq), although the tales of love can never be fit into words nor contained within the confines of language. For those significations are virgins and the hand of verbal expression can never lift the veil behind which they are becurtained. Nonetheless, all our business is to bring those virginal significations together with the virile males of words in the private chamber of linguistic expression.9
Interestingly enough, as we can see, Ghazālī makes use of erotic images to characterize the strange operation of putting the experience of love into words, as if, by so doing, the author was so to speak raping the inner reality of love. At the same time, his image suggests that a full rendition of the reality of love in words is impossible in the same way as complete fusion is impossible in sexual intercourse. But the image also suggests that looking for words to define love is a process of love-making to meanings in the same way as the human lover desperately tries to make love to the Beloved. That effort itself constitutes the path of love. The goal cannot be attained except through silence, just as the realization of love cannot be attained but in annihilation. Time and again, when Ghazālī feels that his prose cannot encompass the vast field of love, he has recourse to poetry, citing a quatrain, either of his own composition or by way of quotation, without offering any further explanation. In a deeper sense, Ghazālī thus remedies the narrowness of language by transmuting verbal expression into visionary experience. Rather than letting us merely hear about what love is, he makes us to behold its various aspects through visual imagery, providing descriptions that resemble what came to be known in later works by Persian poets as ‘divine flashes’ (Lama‘āt). Ghazālī’s insistence on this visionary aspect of love, in which the radiance of the Beloved’s beauty is the source of inspiration, soon became the founding principle of the tradition of the Persian mystical ghazal,10 which reached the absolute perfection of its lyrical art with Ḥāfiẓ.11
In the Persian mystical ghazal in general and in Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals in particular, Beauty appears as a kind of disturbance, the creator of a commotion that stirs up Love. Beauty’s commotion in turn is depicted as a luminous epiphany, which means that any discourse about love must necessarily recreate those radiant but tumultuous conditions. This lovely mȇlée of Beauty’s epiphany also participates in the universal Beauty of Being itself, thus bearing witness both to God’s presence in all His creation and to His supreme Beauty, for ‘Verily, God is beautiful and He loves beauty’, as the Prophet’s saying (ḥadīth) attests.12 The function of the mystical ghazal is thus to reflect, in an aesthetically harmonious manner, this intimate connection between Beauty and Love.
In what follows, while analysing some of these mystical themes, I will discuss some of the key concepts (Beauty, Love, Grief and others) in the symbolic lexicon of Ḥāfiẓ’s erotic philosophy, focusing on the following poem that I would call the ghazal of Pre-Eternity:
1 One day in pre-Eternity a ray of your beauty
Shot forth in a blaze of epiphany.
Then love revealed itself and cast down
A fire that razed the earth from toe to crown.
2 Your face revealed itself, but saw the Angels had
No love, then turned like fire consumed
With jealous rage, and struck the soul of man.
3 From love’s flame reason wished to light
Its lamp. A lightning bolt of jealous wrath
Shot out and made all havoc of the world.
4 The impostor tried to scrutinize the scene
Of Mystery but from the Arcanum
A hand lashed out and smashed the stranger’s chest.
5 For all the rest, from Fate’s games of chance
Joy was ordained. My heart alone, that’s racked
With woe, got grief by the lots of fate.
6 The higher soul which always longed to gain
Access to the well within your sunken chin,
Reached out its hand and grabbed those tangled locks.
7 Ḥāfiẓ, that day your book of The Joy of Love
Was composed for you, the pen crossed out
All means your heart could ever know delight.13
In Pre-Eternity...
The major theme of the ghazal, expressed in its very first word, is a vision of an event that took place ‘in pre-Eternity’ (dar azal), at a time when there was no time, referred to by Ḥāfiẓ in other poems in various terms as the ‘Day of Pre-Eternity’ (rūz-i azal),14 the ‘First Day’ (rūz-i avval),15 the ‘Ancient Pledge’ (‘ahd-i qadim),16 or the ‘Day of the Covenant’ (rūz-i i alast),17 time functioning here as the setting for the founding event of Islam’s metahistory. In fact, dar (‘in’) is a preposition of space and time, expressing the idea of an ‘inner’ space that is, at once, a time. As specialists know, and as simple readers of Ḥāfiẓ intuitively feel, each word chosen by the poet is important: each term has been honed and chiselled to convey a whole constellation of meanings and emotions in a nutshell. Pre-Eternity – azal – is one such technical term that brings to mind a whole range of religious and mystical traditions, and emotions related to those traditions that touch the heart, summoning up to the soul, as it were, echoes of a lost memory.
This whole gamut of psycho-spiritual experience that every sensitive and attuned Persian-speaking reader immediately apprehends from the term azal is better grasped when we examine the metahistory of the term. It is generally accepted that some major events took place on the ‘Day of the Covenant’ (rūz-i i alast) in pre-Eternity. According to the Qur’ān,18 there was once a primordial ‘day before time’, before the actual creation (khalq), where, in a ‘space without space’, no distance between Creator and creature existed. In that prelapserian aeon, God taught Adam the names of all things,19 and made a covenant with Adam. God then asked the yet unborn children of Adam – humanity-to-be – to testify whether He was not their Lord (the famous interrogation: Alast bi-rabbikum?). They all testified that He was their Lord. By their ecstatic rejoinder of ‘Yes’ to this divine query, they sealed the primordial pact of love between the Creator and His creatures. But accepting God as their Lord, Adam/humankind accepted the momentous Burden of the Trust (bār-i amānat)20 that sealed man’s fate. Muslim mystics have alternatively interpreted this ‘burden’ as being either love or knowledge.21 But, for our poet, there is no opposition: naming things means both knowing words and the objects they denote, as well as loving them, insofar as words stand for the reality of things. The very root of the word for poetry – shi‘r – in Arabic is derived from the verb sha’ara (to know, understand intuitively) and, due to its connection with knowledge and understanding, poetry is perceived as having an anagogic function.22 In this particular ghazal, when discussing those events in pre-Eternity, Ḥāfiẓ clearly connects love to a superior knowledge bestowed upon man in the form of ‘radiant beauty’ on that pre-Eternal day.
‘In pre-Eternity a ray of your beauty shot forth ...’ (Dar azal partaw-i ḥusnat zi tajallī dam zad), Ḥāfiẓ writes. The verb dam zadan (translated here as ‘shot forth’) literally means to ‘breathe forth’, ‘to expire’ – the verb evoking the idea of a whispered secret breathed into the ear. It is important to note that the subject of the verb partaw-i ḥusnat (‘a ray of your beauty’) – and hence my title, the ‘Radiance of Beauty’ – is a visual reality that speaks to the ear and reveals something essential about the nature of the divine manifestation or epiphany (tajallī) that evoked that beauty. Here, again, these connotations of the word are essential because they are related to the idea of a luminous revelation. So, on that one day in pre-Eternity, a secret was both seen and heard: Beauty, an Attribute of the Creator’s Face, was revealed and the secret of its manifestation, in a visible form, suggested. Told in terms of a dazzling fiery blaze (ātash) of light, that radiant ‘ray’ (partaw) flashed forth by divine ‘epiphany’ (tajallī), and it is this primordial event that triggered love in the human soul.
The whole universe (‘ālam)23 is a result of this first manifestation, yet only man received its impact: was directly ‘struck’ by it. God himself wanted to reveal His beauty in order to be seen and loved; the Islamic tradition, ‘I was a hidden treasure and I wanted to be known, so I created the world’, is a very famous ḥadīth24 that has inspired many mystics’ vertiginous meditations on the nature of man and, indeed, on the meaning of created beings as mirrors reflecting the beauty of the Creator. Another idea related to the theme of primordial covenant (alast) and alluded to in the next verse by Ḥāfiẓ is that the angels could not understand this ‘hidden treasure’, since their natures did not allow them to bear the heavy burden of the weighty Trust bestowed by God upon mankind.25 And, of course, this necessitates the superiority of mankind over the angels, although Ḥāfiẓ says elsewhere that:
Both human beings and angels take their sustenance
From the existence of love. The practice of devotion
Is a good way to arrive at happiness in both worlds.26
All creatures are in fact produced out of the existence of love, but this does not necessarily mean that they can understand the nature of love or achieve union with the Beloved. For mankind, the problem is that by undertaking the ‘voyage of descent’ (sayr-i nuzūlī) from the upper celestial realm down to this lower material world, both mind and heart seem to have lost all memory of the pre-Eternal epiphany of beauty and the apparition of love. Therefore, the whole purpose of the mystics’ returning ‘voyage of ascent’ (sayr-i su‘ūdī) is to regain the state of the soul that allowed the contemplation of beauty. In other words, when the human soul enters the material body, it loses the memory of its real nature, origin and purpose. This may be a better way of understanding the passage of the Qur’ān referred to above (33:72), where it was stated that by accepting the Trust, man proved himself enigmatically to be ‘an unjust tyrant and a fool’ (ẓalūman jahūlan).27 This folly may be read as humanity’s forgetfulness and disposition to be heedless, because man is, in essence, a forgetful creature. ‘A scholar’, Al-Ma’arī reports, ‘has argued that you are in fact named “man” (insān) on account of your forgetfulness (nisyān)’.28 The adjective ẓalūman may thus be read to mean that not only is man unjust and cruel, to himself as well as tyrannous towards others, but as indicative of the state of anyone over whom darkness (ẓulmat) has fallen, having forgotten the memory of his pre-Eternal condition and so forfeited the divine Trust.
Only those privileged souls who have been singled out by destiny29 have kept in their memory the recollection of that Day, the vision of which they can only narrate in a language that cannot be the language of common reality which has been built on the illusionary truth of logical thinking.30 Ḥāfiẓ is one such privileged soul and this may account for his choice of ‘Ḥāfiẓ’ as his nom de plume (takhalluṣ) – that is, ‘the one who remembers, who has preserved the memory’ of what happened in pre-Eternity. ‘Remembering’ here implies not only keeping in mind the dazzling experience of epiphany – but also bearing consciously, with all its weight, the momentous Trust of love, along with its knowledge and the heavy responsibility which being a trustee entails. In another ghazal, in which Ḥāfiẓ describes the events that took place on the day of alast (referred to as dūsh or ‘last night’), he states:
Last night it happened just before the break
Of dawn: the weight upon my spirit was
Then lifted off, and in that dreary murk
Of night, they gave me the water of
Eternal life. The beam that flashed out from
The Essence made me selfless, and the brew
They gave me from the Cup of Radiant
Theophany revealed to me the Attributes...
From here on in, my face will turn to face
The mirror of that all-reflective charm
And beauty, where these portents were made known
To me about the Essence’s revelation.
... For all this honey and this sugar which
Flows from my speech is but the dividend
Of patience they bequeathed me from that pen:
My reed that’s filled with sugary honey-dew.31
Here, in an allusion to the Water of Life, the poet clearly states that he was given a radiant vision that illuminated his soul and made him immortal and forever intoxicated. The fact that he narrates the Qur’ānic event as having happened personally to him, saving him from darkness, indicates that he has kept alive the memory of that pre-Eternal day and thus become himself, as a poet, a mirror reflecting that beauty. Recollecting the taste of that primordial event, one finds the allusion to his ‘sugary’ verse in the final line, the sugar-cane from which sugar originates, a stock metaphor in classical Persian poetry for the Beloved. So the poem becomes the place and time (note once again here: time and space are confused) where that pre-Eternal epiphany is evoked, arousing the memory of the listener or reader and favouring him with a poetic glimpse of the intoxicating beauty of the divine Essence. The many boasts that Ḥāfiẓ makes about his verse being redolent with the fragrance of Beloved’s tresses32 or indued with the scent of the Garden of Paradise during the time of Adam,33 or his claim that the fruits of his pen are sweeter than sugar,34 bear witness to this same idea, indicating that his poetry aims at reanimating the memory of the soul’s pre-Eternal life through medium of stimuli drawn from the realm of the senses.35
But let us come back to our poem of pre-Eternity. In order to understand the vision of love and beauty in Ḥāfiẓ, it is necessary here to ponder the notion of the amorous melancholic passion known as gham (love’s grief) that is so central to Persian love poetry and so closely associated to the experience of love. Gham is the grief generated by pining in love, conveying the sense of desolation experienced by the longing lover racked with lover’s woes and cares. In this poem, it is juxtaposed (in v. 5) to delight and joy (the Perso-Arabic term ‘aysh used here denotes the unfeeling delight one gleans from superficial pleasures and careless amusements) and (in v. 7) to the light-heartedness (dil-i khurram) that comprises the sad privileges and graceless follies of the oblivious. This polarity between the care-stricken true lover graced with love’s grief and the light-hearted dilettante alien to love’s woes is often alluded to by Ḥāfiẓ, and, indeed, is featured in a very famous line from the opening ghazal in the Dīvān:
A pitchblack night
Billows fearful foaming
the whirlpool’s dreadful
swirling...
Those disenburdened men who stand so careless on the strand,
How can they ever comprehend our state of mind?36
The ‘disenburdened’ (in Persian: sabukbārān-i sāhilhā) are those who stand on the shore careless and unfeeling, unaware of love’s pains and passion, and unaffected by any pangs of yearning. The ‘ocean’ here recalls the ‘ocean of love’ – the Sea of Divine Attributes in which the soul of the Fedeli d’amore dissolves like a drop and is annihilated, but in the deep passions and strong currents of which the ‘disenburdened’ dilettante, safe and dry on the seastrand, has no experience. The word ‘burden’ (bār) reappears here in the term sabukbārān (‘disenburdened’, literally: ‘lightly burdened’) that brings us back to the ‘Burden of the Trust’ (bār-i amānat), which in turn recalls the idea that those who do not partake of love can neither know its pains nor bear its burdens. Both by the medium of knowledge and through the experience of love, the ‘Burden of the Trust’ obliges man to endure pain, grief and longing. To remember is to regain consciousness of that weighty Trust, to become newly aware of what was lost of old and consequently to long to return, to desire to regain the day of union. These are some, but by no means all, the connotations of gham (love’s grief) in the religion of love in classical Persian poetry.
Longing or yearning (shawq) is also an essential and central theme of the whole tradition of love literature in Islam, whether sacred or profane,37 because union without separation is impossible, just as desire with
out loss and deprivation is meaningless. Love and longing are concomitants of each other. That is one reason why anyone who has beheld – and fallen in love with – the primordial beauty is also ‘grief-stricken’ (ghamdīdih): his heart has ‘beheld’ the grief – that is to say, has suffered it personally. Being racked by the memory of loss, he suffers the pangs of yearning which absence entails, which his longing betokens and which his status as a lover demands. There are innumerable lines throughout Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān in particular,38 and in Persian poetry in general, that allude to the centrality of longing in love and the paradox of joy in pain.
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 24