To me it’s these that comprise ‘religion’!119
* * *
Don’t kiss anything except the sweetheart’s lip
And the cup of wine, Ḥāfiẓ; friends, it’s a grave mistake
To kiss the hand held out to you by a Puritan.120
Even if drinking does itself constitute a fault of character, what real harm does it wreak? In any case, who’s really faultless? The poet challenges the Pharisee:
So what if now and then I drink a cup or two of wine?
From blood of grapes the wine comes – not from your veins!
What kind of ‘vice’ is this from which these ‘faults and flaws’ arise?
And if wine has its flaws, well, tell me, where’s one faultless man?121
Elsewhere, elaborating the metaphor of the incendiary nature of nomocentric Muslim religiosity when stripped of Eros, he describes the Muslim pharisees and ascetics as letting the wildfire of their passions spread among their congregations, while allowing religious raptures degenerate into unrighteous rage, by their zeal thus destroying the very foundation of faith:
The fire of ascetic renunciation and hypocrisy
Will eventually consume the harvest of religion.
Ḥāfiẓ, throw off your Sufi robe and go on your way.122
As we have seen, Ḥāfiẓ is quite vocal about the spiritual shortcomings of the fundamentalist zāhids. He assails the empty formalism of their faith in nearly every ghazal, fulminating against their preoccupation with their neighbour’s faults and refusal to acknowledge their own, satirizing their half-baked religious zeal insensitive to erotic spirituality, upbraiding their hypocrisy and sanctimony, conceit and egotism.
In what follows, I will explore another aspect of Ḥāfiẓ’s counter-ethic: his positive theology of sin, which constitutes the poet’s wicked, anti-clerical riposte to the puritan’s religiose pietism.
‘Some Rise by Sin and Some by Virtue Fall’: Ḥāfiẓ’s Positive Theology of Sin
The literary and spiritual doctrines that sustain the poet’s positive theology of sin can be traced back to the diverse Islamic spiritual traditions.123 To show this, let us first revisit the verse cited several pages back which introduced the sybarite rake as sound of faith, though leading an unconventional life construed to be ‘sinful’ by narrow-minded puritans:
The ascetic had too much pride so he 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.124
Addressed to the self-righteous ascetic, this verse on first glance sounds like a simple ‘salvation through sin’ doctrine typical of the ‘school of decadence’ view of Ḥāfiẓ, advocated by his nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle translators such as John Payne and Richard Le Gallienne.125 But the crassness and naivety of their interpretation becomes evident once we examine Ḥāfiẓ’s theology of sin in the light of early Islamic ethical teachings. At the finale of his lengthy interpretation of this verse, ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Khatmī Lāhūrī relates an interesting moral conundrum with which the sixth Shī‘ite Imām, Ja‘far al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765) was once presented: ‘What kind of sin causes the devotee to gain closeness to God, and what sort of act of pious obedience causes the devotee to be estranged from God?’
‘Any act of devotional obedience that leads to pride causes the devotee’s estrangement from God [bu‘d], but any sin that culminates in remorse, regret and shame will result in the devotee’s intimacy and proximity to God [qurbat]’,126 the Imām retorted. Elsewhere, he remarked in a similar vein:
Any sin that begins with fear and culminates in begging forgiveness in fact brings a devotee to God, whereas any work of religious obedience which begins with smug self-satisfaction and culminates in swollen-headedness [‘ujb] will cause him to become a castaway. Therefore the “righteous” devotee who is conceited is a sinner, whereas the sinner who begs forgiveness can be said to be devoutly righteous.127
Here, it may be noted that such theological pronouncements on the value of the ‘blessed sin’ by Imām al-Ṣādiq merely elaborate an idea that had already been broached in a seminal saying ascribed to his illustrious ancestor (the first Shī‘ite), Imām ‘Alī (d. 21/661): ‘The sin that grieves you is better in the sight of God than the virtue that makes you proud.’128 Furthermore, it is hardly incidental that Imām Ṣādiq was one of the main founders of Sufi love mysticism.129 Further research into the spiritual teachings and Sufi mystics of his period immediately following him reveals that Ḥāfiẓ’s unconventional views about sin not only have many antecedents in early Shī‘ite thought and parallels among ḥadīth of the Prophet, but are directly modelled on certain sayings by the classical masters of the Persian Sufi tradition as well.
In their strict differentiation between the jurisprudence of the heart (fiqh al-bāṭin) and the exoteric demands of the Islamic canonical legal code,130 the sayings of both Imāms convey to us the important spiritual message broached briefly above, namely that vanity and pride are vices far more detrimental to the pursuit of virtue than any of the common peccadilloes defined by literalist Sharī‘a-centric piety. From the ninth century onwards, numerous sayings by Persian Sufi teachers began to reiterate this (a)moral message. A review of some of these sayings here will be very useful:
• Yaḥyā ibn Mu‘ādh Rāzī (d. 258/871) declared: ‘The contrition of sinners is far better than the pompous pretensions and display of piety put on by sanctimonious worshippers.’131
• One of the followers of Abū Sa‘īd ibn Abī’l-Khayr (d. 440/1048) asked him: ‘Does the devoted worshipper of God cease to being a devotee if he sins?’ ‘If he is a devotee, not at all,’ argued the master, ‘for the sinning of our father Adam, peace be upon him, did not cause him to lose his rank as God’s devotee or make him cease to be God’s devotee. Be a devotee of Him, then go do wherever you like. For sin accompanied by contrition is certainly better than devotional worship with pride [as can be seen from the fact that] Adam exhibited contrition [and so was saved], whereas Iblīs acted with pride [and so was damned].’132
• Anṣārī even famously versified in his Munājāt Imām ‘Alī’s dictum cited above: ‘O Lord, I despair of such obedient devotion of mine as makes me proud, but blessed be that sin which makes me beg forgiveness!’133
In myriad verses, Ḥāfiẓ elaborates this same liberated and liberal Persian Sufi attitude towards sin, drawing on such sayings.
In the following verse, his ironical contrast of the conceited self-esteem of the ascetic engaged in ritual ‘prayers’ (namāz) to his own drunkenness (mastī) and poverty of spirit (niyāz) – the vainglorious attitude of the former by implication incurring his damnation – inculcates exactly the same moral message found in the sayings cited above:
The starchy ascetic puffed up with prayers and me
With meagre means, drunken ways and poverty –
Betwixt and between, let’s see who God will favour.134
In fact, this verse recasts a Gospel saying very popular among Sufis that was cited by Hāfiẓ’s favourite Sufi master, Amīn al-Dīn Balyānī, mentioned above. Jesus warned his disciples: ‘O disciples, how many lamps are blown out by a little breeze, and how many devotees have been ruined by conceit.’ Taking a cue from this saying, Balyānī moralizes:
If swollen-headedness [‘ujb: NB the same term used by Ḥāfiẓ in this verse] and pride [kibr] can vitiate all the good deeds of devotees [‘ābidān] who are close to God, then the case of those who are far from God is made all the more impalpable. So make the sum and substance of your character to be indigence, humility, lowliness and poverty of spirit, that you may be saved.135
In addition to the sayings narrated by the above authors, the main sources of Ḥāfiẓ’s enlightened theology of sin were the multi-volume Koran commentary in Persian – Kashf al-asrār – by Rashīd al-Dīn Maybudī (d. 520/1126), Anṣārī’s chief spiritual heir, and the Najm al-Dīn Rāzī’s (d. 654/1256) Mirṣād al-‘ibād, the la
tter being the most important medieval manual of Sufism in Persian. In his chapter on the creation of man, Rāzī explains as follows how God justified the superiority of Adam’s sin over the Angels’ virtue:
Divine munificence and lordly wisdom whispered into the innermost core of the angels’ hearts: ‘How can you ever grasp of what we have intended from all eternity to the end of time with this handful of dust? … But you have never had anything to do with this affair of Love, so you can be excused. You are but dry ascetics dwelling in cloisters of holy retirement [zāhidān-i ṣūma‘a-nīshīn ḥaẓā’ir-i quds]. What knowledge can you ever have of the wayfarers who inhabit the Taverns of Ruin of Love [kharābāt-i ‘ishq]? How can those with a ‘safe and sound’ character [salāmatiyān] savour the delights sensed, ever relish the sweet taste enjoyed by those who incur public blame and censure [malāmatiyān]?’136
As Dāryūsh Āshūrī explains in his intertextual study of the Dīvān and these two seminal Sufi classics,137 Ḥāfiẓ inserted much of the same vocabulary, imagery and ideas from many of Rāzī’s passages directly into his poetry. For example, just as Rāzī described God’s rebuke to the angel–ascetics dwelling in Paradise for their loveless temperament, so Ḥāfiẓ in similar terms criticizes the ascetics (zāhidān) of this world:
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, after all, that great.138
In the following verse, like Rāzī, Ḥāfiẓ rebukes the dry ‘ascetic’ (zāhid) for residing in the safety of the ‘cloister’ (ṣūma‘a), identifying himself with Adam destined to inhabit the tavern (kharābat):
Maqām-i aṣlī-yi mā gūsha-yi kharābāt-ast
khudāyash khayr dahād har-ki īn ‘imārat kard
Before all time, our primordial
Degree was in the tavern corner:
God grace with goodness he
Who raised high this edifice.139
Ḥāfiẓ emulates Rāzī’s imagery and ideas in numerous other verses.140 Like Rāzī, he celebrates the sinful, suffering, tavern-haunting Adam who courts reproach (malāmat), and contrasts him unfavourably to the insensitive ascetic, homologous on the earthly plane to the ‘holy’ angels in heaven endowed with a ‘safe and sound character’ (salāmat).141 Juxtaposed to these smug egotistical angel–ascetics, Adam is identified both by Rāzī and Maybudī142 as the prototypical ‘holy sinner’. Adam’s spiritual degree is nonetheless exalted, insofar as he is destined by his lowly, earthly and sinful nature to reveal God’s qualities of Mercy and Beauty during his journey (safar) ‘down under’ through the realm of mortality, where he is divinely destined to be ensnared in human love. Ḥāfiẓ’s entire mythopoetic theogony is permeated by Adam’s tragic journey from metahistory into time, where the theme of his Fall is reiterated verse after verse:
Man Ādam-i bihishtī-am ammā darīn safar
ḥālī asīr-i ‘ishq-i javānān-i mahvasham
I am Adam come down from heaven
Yet, here and now, in this journey, remain
Bewitched – ensnared in love
With youths with faces like the moon.143
Adam, Father of Mankind, is the archetypal inspired libertine (rind). Insofar as all men in being ‘blessed sinners’144 resemble Adam, recreants to God in this realm ici-bas, Ḥāfiẓ taunts the ascetic:
I’m not the only one who has fallen away
From the holy cell; my father Adam himself
Let the eternal heaven slip out of his hands!145
In conclusion, Ḥāfiẓ’s oxymora of the ‘blessed sin’ (the idea of ‘vice’ as leading through the vale of humility and self-abasement up to redemption and felicity) contrasted to ‘accursed virtue’ directing one up the hill of self-righteous sanctimony, only to be cast down into perdition – ‘Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall’146 – should be seen as representing a natural elaboration of Sufi theosophical doctrine within the common esoteric tradition of early Islamic spirituality and not any radical innovation. It is clear that the quotations adduced above from the early Shī‘ite tradition and the later Persian Sufi authors such as Maybudī and Rāzī provide us with the right spiritual perspective to understand the exalted stature accorded to the inspired libertine (rind) in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry. Counterbalancing the vice of pride, sin functions as an adjunct of humility.147
Ḥāfiẓ’s positive attitude towards sin had definite antecedents in the tenets of the Malāmatiyya of Khurāsān several centuries before him, as well as being staunchly underpinned by a combination of Qur’ānic verses and ḥadīths of the Prophet. In the Qur’ān, God’s essential character is described as compassionate, merciful and forgiving.148 One verse praises ‘the godfearing who expend in prosperity and adversity in almsgiving, and restrain their rage, and pardon the offences of their fellowmen; and God loves the good-doers; who, when they commit an indecency or wrong themselves, remember God, and pray forgiveness for their sins, and who shall forgive sins but God?’149 Divine mercy is so all-encompassing that it ‘embraces all things’,150 and men and women together are thus enjoined not to ‘despair of God’s mercy! Surely, God forgives all sins’.151 Furthermore, the celebrated Sacred Tradition, ‘My mercy precedes My wrath’,152 informs us that the divine Nature is not vengeful, but predominantly merciful.
Given these precedents in Muslim scripture, ḥadīth and Sufi doctrine, it is hardly surprising to find that the fundamental keynote of Ḥāfiẓ’s moral theology is an emphasis on God’s mercy and forgiveness (‘afw) of sin.153 To this theme he even devoted an entire ghazal, the first three verses of which are particularly relevant to this discussion:
Last night I heard a singer from
A tavern nook strike up this tune:
‘Drink wine, for God forgives all sin:
Divine indulgence has again
Reprieved you – all’s now pardoned.
– A bulletin from Mercy’s seraphim.’
The singer paused, then cried out once more:
‘God’s grace and favour is supreme,
His grace is there although we err;
God’s benison is greater than our sin.
But hold your tongue; it’s best you’re mute:
This secret point keep clandestine.’154
A literary precedent – perhaps original archetype? – for these verses appears in the Manāqib al-‘ārifīn, the sensational hagiographical account of Rūmī’s life and times by Aflākī. Following the successful completion of a period of 40 days’ seclusion (chilla), Aflākī relates how Rūmī asked his son Bahā’ al-Dīn Sulṭān Walad to relate the greatest divine mystery divulged to him during his retreat. According to Aflākī, Sulṭān Walad said:
When thirty days had elapsed in withdrawal I saw various lights like lofty mountains pass before my gaze and they went by uninterruptedly one troop after another. From the midst of these lights I clearly heard a voice, saying: ‘Verily, God forgives sins altogether (39/53).’ This voice reached the ear of my consciousness in unbroken succession, and from the pleasure of the voice I lost my senses. And again I saw red-, green-, and white-coloured tablets held up before my sight, and written on them were the words: ‘Every sin is forgiven you except turning away from me.’
Straightaway Mowlānā let out a shout and began to spin about, and a tumult broke out due to the excitement of the companions. Mowlānā said: ‘Bahā’ al-Dīn, it is just as you have seen and heard, and a hundred times more! But for the sake of the honor of the religious law and obedience to the Bearer of the Law, keep the secrets concealed and do not tell them to anyone.’155
According to Sufi theosophical teachings about the Divine Names, God’s forgiveness is thus manifested through a ‘theophany’ (tajallī) of certain divine Names and Attributes that reveal His Mercy. For instance, God manifests Himself as the ‘Veiler of Faults’ and ‘Concealer of Vices’ (Sattār al-‘uyūb) under the aegis of His divine
Name: ‘The All-forgiving’ (Al-Ghaffār). Ḥāfiẓ devoted an entire ghazal to describing his own experience of theophanic illumination with the divine Attributes, describing how:
... 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...156
When bathed in the radiant glory of this theophany of divine Mercy, all human sin appears negligible and insignificant, sings Ḥāfiẓ, echoing Sulṭān Walad’s vision of God’s forgiveness of all sins. The Shīrāzī poet takes recourse to the same Sufi theological doctrine of God’s ‘all-forgiving’ Nature in two other verses – both of which, though cited above, merit repetition here:
Don’t look with contempt at a drunk like me,
For all the vaunted glory of the Sharī‘a
Cannot trashed by such small minutiae.157
* * *
Come, come! The glory of this cosmic factory
Shall not be made one whit less or more through austerity
Of men like you or by debauchery of folk like me.158
The Metaphysical Justification of Sin
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime’s by action dignified.
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 32