I said to the master of the tavern: ‘Which road is
The road of salvation?’ He lifted his wine and said,
‘Not revealing the faults of other people.’40
Here, Ḥāfiẓ’s master of the tavern, symbol of the supreme spiritual guide, expounds the doctrine that salvation lies in finding no fault and seeing no evil, a soteriological message traceable back to a homily told by the Prophet on the evils of fault-finding.41 The above verse was directly inspired by the Sufi teachings of Shaykh Amīn al-Dīn Muḥammad Balyānī (668/1269–745/1344), the Master of the Kāzarūnī Order – praised by Ḥāfiẓ as being one of the ‘five chief ornaments’ who flourished during the reign of Shaykh Abū Isḥāq Īnjū (743/1342–753/1353).42 In the Miftāḥ al-hidāya wa miṣbāḥ al-‘ināya, Muḥammad, b. ‘Uthmān’s hagiography of Shaykh Balyānī, we find the following epigram ascribed to Aḥmad Ḥanbal, which provides the gist of the entire spiritual message of the verse: ‘Salvation has ten parts: all ten of these consist in overlooking the faults of others.’43
Ḥāfiẓ’s teachings about fault-finding in such verses were also influenced by the homiletic ethics of ‘Aṭṭār. Because of its relevance to understanding the Persian Sufi background of Ḥāfiẓ’s anti-clericalism, the following lengthy passage from Taqī Pūrnāmdāriyān’s foundational study of Ḥāfiẓ here bears quotation:
If we compare the lengths that ‘Aṭṭār goes to in denunciation of fault-finding with the constant allusions made by Ḥāfiẓ to refraining from cavilling and carping about other people’s faults, coupled with his indictment of the Shaykh, the Ascetic, the Sufi, and the other sanctimonious, pseudo-religious formalists as being uninformed of the world of love and drunkenness due to their censorious nature, it is impossible to deny the influence of ‘Aṭṭār on Ḥāfiẓ. ‘Aṭṭār relates a tale about a dear spiritual adept who would continually say: ‘For seventy years now all I feel is delight and rapture in knowing that a God exists of such stunning beauty, willing to allow a poor devotee such as myself intimacy and closeness to Him.’ In the moral that ‘Aṭṭār draws from this tale, he rhetorically asks: ‘How will anyone preoccupied with criticizing others’ faults ever find delight in divine love?’
You seek for faults to censure and suppress
And have no time for inward happiness –
How can you know God’s secret majesty
If you look out for sin incessantly?
To share His hidden glory you must learn
That others’ errors are not your concern –
When someone else’s failings are defined
What hairs you split – but to your own you’re blind!44
In another story told by ‘Aṭṭār, a drunkard finds fault with the conduct of another drunk, counselling him to drink fewer glasses of wine, so that ‘you will be able to walk in a straight line like me without following anyone else’. The first drunkard, meanwhile, is unaware that he himself is blind drunk and being carried in a sack on the back of his mate. From the tale, ‘Aṭṭār draws the moral that this type of cavilling arises from not being a lover, for the lover always sees all the Beloved’s blemishes as indicative of her beauty and virtue:45
You cannot love, and this is why you seek
To find men vicious, or depraved, or weak –
If you could search for love and persevere
The sins of other men would disappear.46
Such fault-finding, castigation and harassment of others, done in order to secretly demonstrate one’s own virtue and godliness, was a common practice among the false dissemblers of the sharī‘a-oriented piety in Ḥāfiẓ’s day and age. But in the Canon Law (sharī‘a) of Ḥāfiẓ and his Magian Master, the only real sin consists in the upbraiding others for faults, harassing or causing them annoyance.47 As Ḥāfiẓ says:
Cause no distress and grief to another;
Then go and do as you wish – for in
Our Holy Law no other sin than this exists.48
It should also be pointed out that the entire injunction to ‘cause no distress and grief to another’ (mabāsh dar pay-i āzār), propounded in his verse as the sole saving virtue in the entire Muslim Canon Law (sharī‘a), was directly adopted by Ḥāfiẓ, not from ‘Aṭṭār, but – once again – from Balyānī’s Sufi teachings. (Indeed, there is probably much truth in the oral tradition kept by recent masters of the Persian Sufi Dhahabī Order that Balyānī was Ḥāfiẓ’s Sufi master.49) In the Miftāḥ al-hidāya wa miṣbāḥ al-‘ināya, there exists an entire separate chapter devoted to this very subject – ‘On Avoiding Causing Distress to Others [tark-i āzārī]’50 – where (in its very first paragraph) the theological genesis of Ḥāfiẓ’s doctrine in this verse appears:
The Master [Shaykh Balyānī] said: ‘Whoever causes distress and annoyance [āzār: NB exactly the same word used by Ḥāfiẓ’s verse] to people [lit. ‘to God’s servants’], proves himself devoid of faith in God. There is no greater sin [gunāh: NB again exactly the same word used by Ḥāfiẓ] than distressing someone’s heart, nor is there any more meritorious act of devotion than bringing joy to someone’s heart.’ Thus, ‘Abdu’llāh Anṣārī (d. 481/1089) declared: ‘Whatever does not bring any comfort to someone else does not comprise devotional obedience; whatever does not aggrieve and distress a person is not a sin.’51
Interestingly (and not incidentally), Balyānī here also provides the entire text (in Arabic of course) of the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus.52 For such pacifist sentiments, Ḥāfiẓ also had a definite penchant:
With all my strength of hand and fist and arm
What most I give thanks for is this:
That I cannot deploy my might and brawn
Despitefully on anyone to cause distress.53
The Sanctified Sinner and the Castaway Saint
Men with pomp of office clad,
In robes pontifical arrayed,
But stained with avarice and pride:
They love to be preferred, adored
Affect the state and style of lord,
And shine magnificently great:
They for precedency contend,
And on ambition’s scale ascend
Hard-labouring for the highest seat.
...O what a change they soon shall know,
When torn away by death, they go
Reluctant from their splendid feasts,
Condemned in hottest flames to dwell,
And find the spacious courts of hell
Paved with the skulls of Christian Priests!
Charles Wesley (1707–88)
In light of the foregoing discussion of the comparative religious psychology of the ascetic’s degenerate religious zeal, and his tendency, like many archetypal spiritual prostitutes in other of the world’s religions, to cast opprobrious stones at women taken in adultery, let us now reconsider the theosophical meaning underlying Ḥāfiẓ’s verse cited above:
Oh Lord, this egotistical ascetic, whose sights are always fixed on other’s flaws
And faults – Cloud the mirror of his mind with the vapor of his sighs!54
Here, Ḥāfiẓ castigates the ascetic puritan’s metaphysically darkened vision, which causes him to scoff at others’ faults. Benighted, the ascetic’s pride and conceit do not allow him to recognize the ubiquity of divine Providence nor realize that God’s pre-eternal grace embraces the knave as well as the good. Paraphrasing in verse the Qur’ān’s teaching on this subject – ‘And whatever wrong a person commits rests upon himself alone; and no soul laden down with a burden [i.e. afflicted with a sin] shall be made to carry another’s burden [i.e shall be responsible for someone else’s wrong]’55 – the poet asserts that cavilling at the vices of one’s neighbour cannot serve to further one’s own salvation, since ‘the sins of another shall not appear written on your forehead’.56 This same lesson is delivered by the poet to the ascetic in some other key verses:
Whether I am good or bad is not exactly to the point.
Go a
head and be who you are. This world we live in
Is a farm, and each of us reaps our own wheat.57
Whether we are drunk or sober, each of us is making
For the street of the Friend. The temple, synagogue,
The church and the mosque are all houses of love.58
What the ascetic in his hubris misses is precisely the virtue of spiritual poverty (faqr), one of the principle cornerstones of Ḥāfiẓ’s Sufi teachings (see p. 169).59 Hence, Ḥāfiẓ extols and exalts the humble entreaty and desperate neediness (niyāz) of the rake, the rogue, the sinner, the miscreant and the down-and-out homeless beggar over the Qur’ān-thumping puritan and sanctimonious fundamentalist zāhid:
Some people say that good deeds will earn them
A gated house in heaven. Being rakes and natural beggars,
A room in the Magian tavern will be enough for us.60
The puritan ascetic, whose experience embraces only initial degrees of the spiritual path,61 worships God for the sake of heaven and its delights (heavenly maidens, fruits and wines all promised in the Qur’ān). However, for those advanced on the path – that is, the inspired libertine (rind) and the lover (‘āshiq) – the pursuit of paradise purely through the exercise of pious deeds and works of self-mortification is disdained and disparaged. The lover and enlightened libertine have already entered the realm of Paradise by virtue of following their higher secta amoris, expressed in the above verse by the symbol of the Magian Tavern,62 whence Ḥāfiẓ says:
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?63
The ascetic relies on his own efforts in the material realm to reach what he imagines to be paradise, whereas the lover and inspired libertine have long ago abandoned the longing for aught but the divine, the Beloved.64
Another problem concerns the differing spiritual attitudes of rind and zāhid. The difference between the inspired libertine and ascetic is one of spiritual perspective with regard to both action and contemplation. For the latter, the bare motion of formal rituals and pious observances (prayer, renunciation, etc.) takes precedence; for the former, it is the contemplative ‘intention’ (niyyat) of the heart and the fervour of spiritual neediness and poverty (faqr) which are of primary importance.65
This difference of spiritual attitudes between rind and zāhid harks back to the classical definition of ‘ascetic renunciation’ (zuhd) given by Abū’l-Qāsim Junayd (d. 297/910), cited in the earliest major work on Persian Sufism by Abū Ibrāmīm Mustamlī Bukhārī (d. 434/1042–3) – his monumental multi-volume commentary entitled Sharḥ al-ta‘arruf on al-Kalābadhī’s (d. 380/990) Kitāb al-ta‘arruf li-madhhab ahl al-taṣawwuf. Junayd remarked: ‘Ascetic renunciation [al-zuhd] is to empty one’s hands of all possessions and divest the heart of pursuit of them.’ Bukhārī then explains Junayd’s saying with the comment that the first degree (of the hands) belongs to the common masses of devotees, whereas the second degree (of the heart) pertains to the spiritual Elect.66 Ḥāfiẓ, referring precisely to this distinction, evokes in one verse the contrast in spiritual perspectives between the conceited ascetic on the one hand and humble faqīr on the other:
Since none of your affairs by prayer succeeds,
O Puritan, I prefer my drunken midnight cries,
My desperate beggary and hapless penury.67
The ascetic’s vaunted quantity of works and practices (ritual devotions, public alms-giving and prayers) ultimately lead nowhere, as this verse attests, whence the emphasis Ḥāfiẓ places on the inspired libertine’s interior quality and ardour of faith as the correct basis for all spiritual practice. The spiritual context of Ḥāfiẓ’s emphasis in this verse on the higher virtue of the spiritual poverty of the ‘rakes [rind] and natural beggars [gidā]’, in whose company he delights, as the verse cited a page earlier also attests (‘Some people say...’), is immediately illuminated once we consider this saying of Bāyazīd Basṭāmī (d. 261/875): ‘I repent once from my sins, but must repent a thousand times over for my obedient devotion to God.’ ‘Aṭṭār comments on Bāyazīd’s statement that taking pride in one’s good deeds and being conceited about one’s acts of worship is a moral failing much worse than any ‘sin’.68 In a similar vein, ‘Abdu’llāh Anṣārī takes a critical snipe at both the Puritan ascetic’s conceit and the learned intellectual’s pride, and, castigating both, objects that ‘The ascetic vaunts his self-discipline and the intellectual boasts of his learning’.69
In this respect, it should be underlined that in Ḥāfiẓian social ethics, dervish contentment (qanā‘at) and spiritual poverty (faqr) are venerated as the supreme virtues, as numerous verses attest:
Do not disparage the weak and the skinny. Remember that,
You men of wealth. We know the one given the chief seat
In the Gathering is the saddhu sleeping in the street.70
Or:
You men of power and ways and means, such haughty
Pride is out of place. Don’t let disdain swell your heads,
Since all your vaunted wealth and rank
Depends in the end upon the will of dervishes.71
Or:
If there’s profit in this bazaar it lies
In the joyous contented dervish.
Grant me God the bliss of contentment
And the grace of being a happy dervish.72
The ascetic pays far more dearly for indulging in unctuous hubris about his specious piety, Ḥāfiẓ thus warns, than the libertine ever will for his ‘licence’:
You Puritans on the cold stone floor, you are not safe
From the tricks of God’s zeal: the distance between the cloister
And the Zoroastrian tavern is not all that great.73
Hence, Ḥāfiẓ’s antinomian refusal to rank the ascetic’s vaunted austerity and acts of self-mortification (zuhd) above the sybarite rake’s licentiousness (fisq), for both await God’s final will – ever suspended till Judgement Day.74 The distinction between sinner and saint is ever far from self-evident; who dares discern who’s sinner and who’s saint?
Come, come! The glory of this universal factory
Will not be made one whit more or less through austerity
Of men like you or by debauchery of folk like me.75
Since happiness and bliss in this life and salvation and felicity in the hereafter can only be gained through abasement, humility and self-negation,76 ultimately, says Ḥāfiẓ, the inspired libertine (rind) is destined to partake far more of God’s grace than the proud ascetic:
The ascetic had too much pride so could never soundly
Traverse the Path. But the rake by way of humble entreaty
And beggary at last went down to the House of Peace.77
The very anti-clerical – ostensibly amoral – doctrine expressed in this verse, which ranks the inspired libertine and sinful debauchee higher than the graceless zealot and self-satisfied puritan, is based on the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican in the Gospel of Luke (18:10–14).78 This lovely gospel tale was then recast by the Sufis as the ‘Story of the Sinner and Ascetic in the Company of Jesus’ – the ascetic who rejected by God due to his pride and the sinner redeemed because of his humility. In the medieval Persian Sufi tradition, Luke’s parable was first retold by Abū’l-Qāsim Qushayrī in his famous treatise on Sufism, later recounted by Abū Ḥāmid Ghazālī in the Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn, and finally and lastly immortalized in verse by Sa‘dī in his chapter on ‘Humility’ in the Būstān – all of which Ḥāfiẓ, the ‘Memorizer’ and redoubtable scholar of Islam’s sacred scripture, certainly had read. Describing God’s revelation to Jesus that the sinner’s humble entreaty had reaped the fruit of salvation and the pride of the fair-seeming but hypocritical zealot, who thanked God he was not as other men are, earned him a place in the Fire, Ḥāfiẓ’s doctrine in the above verse quite precisely encapsulates the gist of these verses from
Sa‘dī’s Būstān:
The signs of Glory struck his being, yet Jesus only heard an angelic epiphany amidst the ascetic’s ignorant curses: ‘Both the fool and the wiseman I accept’, the Divine Call came. ‘Both petitions I endorse, but the poseur of piety gets sent straight to hell, and the other, blackguard and profligate, I elevate to heaven in My Grace; for he turned to Me repentant, wept, was chastened and sobered by his darkened days, the opportunities cast away. I cannot cast out from the chancel of My Mercy anyone who seeks Me with such self-avowed wretchedness. But if the puritan dogmatist thinks he’s defiled by the sinner in heaven’s synod ... Very well, tell him not to worry. Let the self-proclaimed saint go to hell and the debauchee he despises go to paradise. For one rent his soul in remorse, seared in conscience, scalded himself with tears, while the other relied on his personal ascetic devotion.’ If only he knew: in the court of the Opulent, helplessness excels pride, contrition outshines egoism. The clothes of pride are pretty, but its underwear is filthy. On this threshold poverty and contrition serve you better than self-adoration or devotion. ... Godliness and egoism are opposites ... It simply doesn’t matter whether you’re a profligate, fortune wasted away, or painstaking ascetic full of vain mortification. ... The wise all have their adages, pronounced for posterity. From Sa‘dī learn by heart one maxim alone: The soul-mortified sinner, brooding on God is better than the canting ascetic [zāhid] affecting piety.79
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 30