As Sa‘dī explains in this passage, it is egotism and self-righteousness which are the chief flaws of the Muslim ascetic’s religious personality. These two vices act as a veil between his soul and God. This veil the Sufis refer to as ‘the veil of the infidel selfhood’.
The Veil of the Infidel Selfhood
If it were not for his vain conceit and hypocrisy (khwud-bīnī, riyā) – which in Ḥāfiẓ’s view are considered to be the Mother of Evil80 – the puritan might even be forgiven. But there is no possibility of spiritual knowledge or gnosis (ma‘rifat), as long as conceit in one’s own learning exists. Ḥāfiẓ views the true poet-savant as always ‘selfless’,81 spiritual liberation lying in the negation of egocentric consciousness. This is the supreme Sufi art of unselfconsciousness, existence through nonbeing – literally not seeing oneself:
As long as you see yourself learned and intellectual
You’ll lodge with idiots; moveover, if you
Can stop seeing yourself at all, you will be free.82
The above verse provides an exact versification of a saying by the Sufi saint Shāh Shujā‘ Kirmānī (d. after 270/884) concerning the true meaning of ‘learning’ (faḍl): ‘Learned and intellectual folk [ahl-i faḍl] may be said to be more virtuous than other people as long as they do not see their own learning, but once they perceive themselves to be learned or virtuous, they cease to have any virtue at all.’83
The notion of ‘not seeing oneself’ as the key to spiritual freedom, as Abū’l-Ḥasan ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Khatmī Lāhūrī, commenting on this verse, points out, is best illustrated in a story told in the beautiful medieval Sufi work on the Divine Names: the Rawḥ al-arwāh fi sharḥ asmā’ al-malik al-fattāḥ by Aḥmad Sam‘ānī (d. 534/1140) about Bishr ibn Ḥārith Ḥāfī (d. 227/842), a Persian Sufi from Merv in Khurāsān. In his wanderings, Bishr Ḥāfī came across the immortal prophet Khiḍr (sometimes identified with the Biblical Elias and Ahasuerus by Muslim authors84) and appealed for his blessings. In reply, Khiḍr prayed, ‘May God conceal your works of obedience from you’. ‘The inner significance of Khiḍr’s statement’, Lāhūrī explains, ‘in this adage may be epitomized: “How many acts of obedience are iniquity and how many sins are blessed!”’, concluding:
From this tale it may be understood that perceiving one’s own learning and artistic talent and beholding one’s intellectual learning and legal lore inhibits realization of direct visionary gnosis [ma‘rifat-i shuhūdī]. This is because direct visionary gnosis only occurs in a state of the wayfarer’s annihilation from his own self, character traits, and individual personality.85
As we have seen from the foregoing discussion, much of Ḥāfiẓ’s genius is devoted to dissecting the psychopathology of religious hypocrisy, to composing lampoons in verse on spiritual materialism, and deriding the literalistic religious perspective based on rote learning and devotion by the book. In the following verse, Ḥāfiẓ derides the ascetic’s vain egocentricity (khwud-bīnī) and complains that the town preacher, who hypocritically lays claim to religious conviction and makes a show of faith he doesn’t have, will never become a true Muslim:
I know this sort of talk won’t
be easy for the city preacher to take –
But so long as he plays the hypocrite
and plies the craft of mummery
A ‘Muslim’ is what he’ll never be.86
Here, he has in mind both the moral and the metaphysical shortcomings of the pharisaical Islamic faith of such an impostor. On the moral level, the ascetic’s vanity, fury and misplaced zeal is generated by hubris, insofar as practitioners of ascetic exercises tend to make a display of piety – turning private worship into public exhibitionism, thus leading to the malaise of hypocrisy (riyā). A danger of another sort is that the ascetic’s excesses may lead to the development of psychic powers, causing him to fall into the delusion of imagining himself as a member of the elect and the company of the saints. Both are spiritual maladies of the worst sort.
Islam’s greatest mystical theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), in the course of his analysis of the psychology of the abuse of such religious emotions, thus observed that ‘the second cause of pride arises from asceticism [zuhd] and religious devotion [‘ibādat]. Ascetics, Sufis and pious devotees [pārsā] are often not without arrogance [takabbur], and their affliction with this vice may even reach the point that they imagine that others are actually obligated to serve them and appeal to them, assuming that their own pious devotion obliges everyone else to venerate them!’87
Furthermore, on the metaphysical level, the ascetic who suffers from amour propre, prepossessed of an infantile, inflated sense of self-importance, cannot transcend the artificial duality of percept and object, seer and seen, nor see beyond the illusory distinction between ‘me’ and ‘thee’, ‘I’ and ‘thou’. Since he cannot apprehend the transcendental immersion of the part in the Whole, Lover in Beloved, or servant in the Lord, the ascetic doesn’t understand that he him-self in his ‘infidel Selfhood’ constitutes the ultimate metaphysical sacrilege.88 Ḥāfiẓ describes the struggle that rending the veil of Self/him-self entails him in the following famous verse:
Between lover and beloved there exists
No veil at all. You, you yourself are
Your own veil: Ḥāfiẓ, get out of the way!89
This line represents a gloss in verse on the Prophet’s statement: ‘Your greatest foe is your own soul between your ribs’,90 a ḥadīth which the Sufis traditionally interpreted to mean that ‘your very self [nafs-i khwud] is the greatest veil’.91 Thus, when Bāyazīd was asked how he would describe the way to God, he replied: ‘Once you remove yourself from blocking the way to God, you will have arrived at Him.’92
Excoriating his nescience, Ḥāfiẓ scoffs at the arrogance of the ascetic on both the moral and metaphysical level in many verses, of which the following is typical:
Go away, you egoist ascetic! This mystery
Behind the veil is concealed to the eye
Of you and me – and hidden it shall remain.93
To sum up the discussion so far concerning the ‘veil of the infidel selfhood’: there are two main obstacles – respectively moral and metaphysical – impeding the ascetic’s efforts at spiritual realization.
The first, the moral impediment that prevents the ascetic from rending the ‘veil’, is simply – to use the apt phrase descriptive of the condition of a fictional English Puritan, the steward Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – that he is ‘sick of self-love’.94 That is to say, that the ascetic is preoccupied with the delusion of his own virtue and moral excellence. This is the main reason why Ḥāfiẓ, from the spiritual station of inspired libertinism (rindī), deprecates the puritan ascetic (zāhid) for his conceit, arrogance and self-centredness, and extols instead the inspired libertine (rind), who has transcended these vices.95
Secondly, the metaphysical stumbling block to the ascetic’s egocentric vision is his false distinction and discrimination of separative personal ‘identities’ (‘you’ vs. ‘me’), so that, not having yet experienced immersion in the sea of the Unity of Being (again quoting Shakespeare’s description of Malvolio), he tastes ‘with a distempered appetite’.96 Not having stepped outside the small courtyard of natural existence and thus unable to enter the temenos of the spiritual path, the ascetic has yet to learn that:
The beauty of the Friend has no veil
Nor mask her charm can conceal;
Just let the pathway’s dust first settle
And then you’ll catch a glimpse of her.
But you who won’t desert the court
Of human nature, how hope you’ll ever take
A step upon the Sufi Path?97
For these reasons, being veiled from these mysteries of creation and the spiritual life, the ascetic is a moral, psycho-spiritual and metaphysical polytheist.98
Bacchanalian Piety: Ḥāfiẓ’s Counter-Ethic and Riposte to Hidden Polytheism
&
nbsp; To be Good only, is to be
A Devil or else a Pharisee.
William Blake99
Ḥāfiẓ’s anti-clerical invectives to a large part assail the insidious invisible vice of hypocrisy. In the phenomenology of religious experience, hypocrisy is always portrayed as the most deeply hidden of the vices. In these lines from Paradise Lost, depicting Satan decked out in an angel’s habit, accosting the archangel Uriel who guards the gate of Paradise, Milton gives an excellent description of the hiddenness of the vice of hypocrisy:
So spake the false dissembler unperceived;
For neither man nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks
Invisible, except to God alone...100
Ḥāfiẓ’s considered hypocrisy in the form of the ostentatious display of religious piety to be the worst moral evil. He understood, as Khurramshāhī stresses, ‘hypocrisy [riyā] to be the Mother of all Evil [umm al-fasād]. All throughout his life he thought it his personal duty to struggle against it in all its varieties and shapes, whether cloaked in the robes of members of exoteric legalistic Islam [ahl-i sharī‘at] or concealed beneath the garments of Sufi piety [ahl-i ṭarīqat]. Ḥāfiẓ’s entire Dīvān is one long manifesto of opposition to religious hypocrisy.’101 In Ḥāfiẓ’s moral theology, Khurramshāhī continues:
The sin most destructive of Islamic piety and most dangerous to humanity is hypocrisy [riyā]. The moral range of the sin of ‘hypocrisy’ in this respect Ḥāfiẓ extended broadly to include such vices as self-righteousness, smugness, conceited self-satisfaction [khwūd-rā’ī], putting on airs, ostentatious displays of ascetic piety [zuhd-furūshī], vaunting one’s learning [faḍl-furūshī], considering oneself to be holy and sacrosanct, bragging of and setting stock in one’s own acts of pious devotion, superciliousness, mendacity, imposture, deceit, duplicity in one’s relation to God and man, cruel lack of feeling [bīdardī], being without love and wisdom, and so on. It can be definitively affirmed that no one anywhere or any time throughout the history of Islamic civilization has ever gone to battle against hypocrisy [riyā’] with such pugnacity or laboured with such zealous determination to uproot this vice as has Ḥāfiẓ.102
His obsessive hatred of hypocrisy (riyā) is the chief theme of his anti-clerical poetics and remains the principle political reason why he is still, six centuries on, the most popular bard in his homeland – the ‘Islamic’ Republic of Iran, where religious quacks and sanctimonious swindlers still call all the shots and only duplicitous con-men adept in the black arts of pious dissimulation can eke out a decent living.
Ḥāfiẓ’s predominant social attitude is anti-hypocritical. In his eyes, vice itself often becomes preferable to the pious masquerade of virtue,103 which is why one finds him in certain verses petulantly indulging in a kind of Rimbaudesque celebration of perversion:
Lift up the tulip-cup: its eyes’ drunken narcissus gaze,
And set on me the label ‘pervert’. With so many judges
That are set over me, O Lord, who should I take to be my judge?104
Ḥāfiẓ’s condemnation of hypocrisy as the ‘supreme sin’105 has many antecedents in classical Sufi texts, where it is repeatedly condemned as a vice. In his The Hundred Fields, the first treatise written in Persian on the classification of the spiritual stations of the Sufi Path, ‘Abdu’llāh Anṣārī (d. 482/1089) of Herat, the eminent Ḥanbalite theologian and leading stylist of Persian rhyming prose, characterizes hypocrisy as shirk or ‘polytheism’ – that is, association of other gods with God.106 Shirk is the worst heresy in Islamic thought. Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) explains that hypocrisy is ‘an act of devotion performed publicly so that people think that one is especially pious’.107 Since hypocrisy involves the perpetuation of an emotional pretence – the heart’s vocation devotion to the One God, but the mind’s avocation being a neurotic obsession with society and people – the Sufis discerned how such dissimulation easily becomes transmuted into an ‘interior polytheism’. ‘Know that the slightest ostentatiousness [riyā’] constitutes polytheism’,108 Imām ‘Alī famously pronounced.
‘Polytheism’ in this context is psychological, not doxological, relating to the subtle notion of ‘hidden polytheism’ (shirk-i khafī), to which the Prophet alluded in his saying: ‘The creeping of shirk in my community is more hidden [akhfā] than the creeping of a black ant over a hard rock on a dark night.’109 Shakespeare excellently sums up the horror of the hiddenness of the schizophrenic polytheistic perspective, in which the rigidity of moral virtue is secretly transformed into the rigidity of evil, when he remarked that:
’Tis too much prov’d, that with devotion’s visage
And pious action we do sugar o’er
The devil himself.110
Ḥāfiẓ criticizes the spiritual fakes and showmen of his day in exactly this psychological sense, mocking those who he referred to as ‘the cabal of hypocrites’ (ahl-i riyā), which is translated in the verse below as ‘people whose words and deeds don’t match’:
I want to be far away from people whose words
And deeds don’t match. Among the morose and heavy-
Hearted, a heavy glass of wine is enough for us.111
To redress counterfeit religiosity and hypocritical displays of religious fervour in which outward colours of devotion and piety but serve to camouflage a lack of inward ardour, he advocated a counter-ethic of bacchanalian piety in his poetry.112 The following verse is a typical expression of this malāmatī ethic:
I am so disgusted in my heart by the hypocrisy
Of the Muslim abbey that if you were
To wash me in wine, that would be a just thing.113
Since, on the moral plane, any sort of self-abnegation, whether psychical or physical, helps the devotee avoid falling prey on the psychospiritual plane to hidden polytheism, malāmatīs such as Ḥāfiẓ deliberately attracted blame to themselves. In brief, this is the gist – a malāmatī practice used as a spiritual device – underlying most of the poet’s bacchanalia. Through this counter-ethic the poet detached himself from the sin of conceit and self-satisfaction – even if occasion demanded he be condemned for ‘impiety’ or ‘infidelity’:
Go into town where all the taverns are
and give the winesellers this news:
Say: Ḥāfiẓ is ‘born again’, that he forswears
the cozenage of abstinence and sham austerity.114
As a high principle of malāmatī practice, the drinking of wine in Ḥāfiẓ’s lexicon is the benchmark of authentic bacchanalian piety. This explains why in his verse he always spits out the sobriquet ‘ascetic’ (zāhid) as a term of abuse and why it carries exclusively negative connotations. More than the ill apparent in wine or drunkenness, the real evil lies in believing the heresy of the holier-than-thou selfhood of the devotee himself. The chicanery of religious pretence and hypocritical ostentation consequently came to be viewed as a far graver sin than consumption of intoxicating beverages – which is precisely the ethical message inculcated by such bacchanalian pronouncements as:
Drink wine. To sin a hundred times alone
Where no one knows is better than these orisons
They offer up for public pious dissimulation.115
Going on the offensive with this radical anti-clerical rhetoric, as an act of defiance to religious fraudsters, Ḥāfiẓ declares that there may even be a kind of religious piety in wine drinking:
The drinking of wine in which there’s no chicanery
Or putting on an act is better than the cant of phoney
Ascetical piety and its counterfeit devotions set on display.116
Just as today defenders of women’s rights, in order to defy the brutal and repressive mullahocracy in Iran, predicate their activities as being a Lipstick Jihad – the title of Azadeh Moaveni’s delightful memoir of reporting for Time magazine in the Ayatollahs’ Republic – for poets resisting the tyranny of religious despots, such petulantly defiant
bacchanalian language indeed proved very effective. Since there is certainly far more virtue in being a notorious drunkard in public than grace in being a good hypocrite in private, Ḥāfiẓ argues:
They say hypocrisy is kosher but the wineglass is prohibited?
Which Sufi Path is this? How great a government, what
Pure Holy Canon Law, what fine Faith this all shows us!117
Such anti-clerical bacchanalian expressions (a dozen others just as brazen might be cited) allowed Ḥāfiẓ to clarify his position in regard to the sanctimony of Muslim clerics, with their hypocritical masquerade of enforcing abstention from wine. He stresses that open and public consumption of wine is ethically preferable and even morally superior to Muslim prohibitionists, who would give a false impression of abstinence:
Godfearing piety and holy duty: leave those to ascetics.
To us leave wine, and let time decree between
The two which one the Friend shall choose.118
* * *
I beg your pardon, ascetics, I’ll never abandon
The lip of the friend nor the bottle of wine.
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 31