Shakespeare159
One of the most paradoxical ideas in Ḥāfiẓ’s theology of sin by which he justifies the inspired libertine’s salvation is what might be called the metaphysical justification of sin.160 The inspired libertine, enthralled in the chains of Eros, has realized the exalted degree of spiritual poverty, and paradoxically becomes a free spirit who neither sighs for Heaven nor quakes in fear of Hell, which is why:
The beggar on your back street does not have need
Of any of Heaven’s eightfold Mansions; the captive
In your chains is free of both this world and the Next.161
His metaphysical justification of sin leads him to advocate the antinomian view that paradise is the final fate of sinners rather than the reward for those who are especially pious and good, and hence his boast:
Heaven is ordained for us. Paradise our destiny.
Oh theologian, go away!
It’s erring sinners who deserve God’s generosity.162
The poet here definitely does not mean that any foolish sinner deserves heaven more than the inspired seer. The epithet ‘theologian’ (khudā-shinās: ‘knower of God’) given to the pretentious and sanctimonious ascetic is meant sarcastically, not seriously.163 Although Ḥāfiẓ’s poetic theology is here couched in a language subversive to orthodox Islamic soteriology, the theological doctrine underpinning the apparent blasphemy of the verse is based on a number of venerable sources in classical Islamic thought. Here only one of these need be mentioned. Ghazālī relates that once the Prophet said: ‘There are certain devotees who will enter paradise because of committing a sin.’ ‘How can that be?’ he was asked. Muḥammad responded: ‘The devotee may commit a sin, and then feel remorseful about it and so repent of it, thus keeping it before his mind until the day he enters Paradise.’164
Complementing Ḥāfiẓ’s doctrine of the metaphysical justification of sin appears the sister concept of the metaphysical necessity of sin. In The Sinners’ Paradise, a major work consecrated to the spiritual necessity of sin in Islam, Shaykh Aḥmad Jām (Zhanda Pīl, d. 520/1126)165 explains this doctrine as follows:
Gnosis is a ‘burning light’ and the lamp from which it shines is a ‘burning light’,166 – the gnostic’s chest the receptacle for its light – so the light of gnosis [nūr-i ma‘rifat] keeps the gnostic ‘warm’ in the same way that the lamp warms up the glass. Just as whatever you put in that lamp will be burnt up by it, so every sin which the light of gnosis shines upon is obliterated and annulled. Just as firewood cannot withstand fire, so sin cannot resist gnosis. Just as a candle cannot be used as a lamp in the sunshine, nor even be used during daylight, so the gnostic, when illumined by the shining rays of gnosis, does not need to have recourse to any rational mode of demonstration or guidance in order to know God. Likewise, just as a lamp is of benefit in the darkness of the night, the lamp of gnosis also performs its proper service when confronted by the turbidity of sin and the darkness of heretical innovation [bid‘at].
... God Almighty has compared gnosis to a fire so that we will know that just as nothing can withstand fire, which burns up everything that is combustible, no sin can resist being consumed by the existence of gnosis: in fact, the more firewood [i.e. sin] there is, the higher, hotter and brighter becomes the fire. Now I would have to write an entire book in order to expound this topic fully, but this much is enough for one who is intelligent, wise and spiritually informed.
God Almighty has created the gnostic [‘ārif] for the sake of sinning [gunāh kardan], as the Tradition (that expresses this idea best) states ‘If you did not sin, God would have to create another company of sinners to sin, that He might forgive them.’167 In another tradition it is related that one of the prophets of the early tribes of Israel entreated God: ‘O God, this people of mine sin excessively. Rectify them!’ God sent him this revelation: ‘If they did not sin, I would have to create another community to sin, so that I could show them mercy. These seas of Mercy are all for the sake of sinners. I have created the sinners, and did they not exist, sin would not exist, so all would be in vain.’
Therefore, the sin of the gnostic believer [mu’min-i ‘ārif] can be likened to firewood and gnosis compared to fire. As long as fire is there, what danger can firewood present? For when the fire is lit, the firewood is made naught. How should fire burn fire? The fire requires wood to give off light, needing it as fuel, so that people may derive benefit from it. Whether there is a whole bushel of firewood or a hundred or a hundred thousand bushels, it matters not: the quality of fire is the same – although the more firewood there is, the higher and brighter dances its flame, and the more combustible the fire is.168
The same phenomenon of gnosis produced through the fire of sin is expounded in the Kashf al-asrār by Maybudī, who depicts Adam, prototype of all human beings, as having been ‘first scorched by the fire of divine guidance [in Paradise], then [cast out of Paradise] cooked in the oven of the punishment of Adam sinned and disobeyed his Lord (Qur’ān XX: 121), from which the sustenance of love generated by the fire [of his sin] was vouchsafed him’.169 The fires of sin only generate wisdom and gnosis for Adam-the-lover, archetype of the enlightened libertine. In a poem modelled after (and written in the same rhyme and metre as) the work of the greatest Persian bacchanalian poet Nizārī Quhistānī (d. 721/1321),170 Ḥāfiẓ expresses this classical Sufi doctrine as follows:
My life is a black book. But don’t rebuke a drunk
Like me too much. No human being can ever read
The words written on his own forehead.
When Ḥāfiẓ’s coffin comes by, it’ll be all right
To follow behind. Although he is
A captive of sin, he is on his way to the Garden.171
Guided by his higher consciousness that bestows upon him a perception of the unity of opposites through Love, the sinner–sage thus understands like Ḥāfiẓ:
Howeversomuch I am steeped in sin in a hundred different ways
Since I’ve become acquainted with Love, I number myself
Among the company of those who enjoy God’s mercy.172
Since love transcends all religious commandments, overrules all sentient, illusory and temporal phenomena, resolves all conflicts raging between the various scholastic schools of theology and jurisprudence, Ḥāfiẓ issues this ecumenical call for the unity of religions from the station of Love which still resounds today:
Let’s forgive the seventy-two sects for their ridiculous
Wars and misbehaviours. Because they couldn’t accept
The path of truth, they took the road of moonshine.173
Conclusion
As the above discussion has shown, in order to understand Ḥāfiẓ’s views on the vice and virtue of sinners or saints, we need to comprehend the interior, spiritual sense in which he approached the Qur’ān and the ḥadīth. We must also study the nuances of his usage of the symbols of the mystical Sufi tradition in which his verse is steeped.174 If Ḥāfiẓ in his verse inveighs against the fundamentalist Islam of the puritan zāhid, his antinomianism is not simply ‘blasphemy for the blasphemy’s sake’; rather it is part of his counter-ethic of bacchanalian piety put at the service of Eros. What is ‘profane’ in his verse is not opposed to the Sacred as such; rather the stock figures of the ‘drunkard’ (mast), ‘pervert’ (fāsiq) and ‘inspired libertine’ (rind) are deliberately employed as part of the malāmatī and qalandarī lexicon of the profane to scoff at religious cant and sanctimony. Part of Ḥāfiẓ’s anti-clerical repertoire, these terms belong to the armoury of his bacchanalian counter-ethic that he wielded as poetic weapons in his perpetual battle with Islam’s own hypocrites and Pharisees.
The same may be said of Ḥāfiẓ’s vaunting of sin and exaltation of the sinner, his claim that God is the blessed sinner’s, not the self-righteous pietist’s friend – all his views on these matters have precise religious references with ethical connotations, 175 and are squarely based on well-known early Persian Sufi theoerot
ic and metaphysical doctrines.176 Underlying his passionate contempt for the Muslim pharisees and puritans of his day, if one can detect the presence of a higher moral message in his philosophical doctrine of ‘inspired libertinism’, it is perhaps best encapsulated in this verse:
Heart-friend, I guide you well along Salvation’s way:
Neither vaunt perversity nor hawk austerity.177
Notes
1 See Javādī, Tārīkh-i ṭanz dar adabiyāt-i fārsī, pp. 93–124. I would like to thank Terry Graham and Jason Elliot for their many helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.
2 M.R. Shafī‘ī-Kadkanī, Zamīna-i ijtamā‘ī-yi shi‘r-i fārsī, pp. 311–12, stresses anti-clerical content of Ḥāfiẓ’s verse, underlining how all the parody and invective in his poetry and all his social criticism and satire is aimed at figures of religious authority who personify sanctimony and cant.
3 For an overview of the inspired libertine’s role in his poetry, see my Prolegomenon 2, pp. 31–55 above.
4 Pope, Essay on Man, IV: 305–6.
5 Cf. the many useful citation of verses from Ḥāfiẓ on this subject in Khurramshāhī, Ḥāfiẓ-nāma, I, pp. 365ff., and the excellent assembly of ‘Descriptive Adjectives, Names and the Qualities of Worldliness in Ḥāfiẓ’ in Bihishtī’s Sharḥ-i junūn, pp. 680–735.
6 The Puritan movement was the ‘militant tendency’ within English Protestantism, and lasted down to the late seventeenth century in England and into the early eighteenth century in the USA. The actual word ‘Puritan’ was coined in the middle of the sixteenth century by the English as a handy term of abuse and insult directed at non-conformist Protestant clergy (Collinson, ‘Antipuritanism’, pp. 19–23), being one of several pejorative nicknames applied to the hotter sort of hyper-zealot who wished to ‘reform the Reformation’. The ‘fraudulent piety’ of many Puritans in English society, who often incarnated ‘the very sins which Puritans attribute to the ungodly: unprincipled greed, deception and dishonesty; and especially, sexual depravity’ (ibid., p. 29), led the Puritan to become the stereotype of a religious hypocrite in Elizabethean drama, since ‘hypocrisy was the kind of key signature for everything else attributed to Puritans’ (ibid., p. 27). Originally a word with a positive connotation denoting a person of upright and public godliness, the term ‘Puritan’ soon became an antithetical stigma hurled at religious hypocrites who were the real puritans’ less-than-ideal representatives. This stereotypical connotation of ‘Puritan’ as a religious hypocrite renders it a near-perfect translation, or at least a handy English idiomatic equivalent, for Ḥāfiẓ’s zāhid, a character with almost identical traits in Persian literature. The term ‘puritan’ in the Islamic context has recently been successfully employed to great effect as a convenient label for the most notorious of modern zāhids: the Wahhabi fundamentalists of contemporary Saudi Arabia. See Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists, the chapters on ‘The Rise of the Early Puritans’ and ‘The Story of Contemporary Puritans’. My usage of terms such as ‘puritan’, ‘pharisee’ and ‘fundamentalist’ here is not meant to reflect any particular historical denomination in any religion, past or present, nor do I wish to efface the full splay and delicate nuances of centuries of Muslim religious and literary historical usage of terms such as zāhid, faqīh, and so on, by means of these terminological generalizations. Needless to say, the lives and writings of many members of the historical ‘Puritan’ movement, such as John Milton (1608–74) and John Bunyan (1628–88), do exemplify a certain type of esotericism and often even give voice to their staunch opposition to the fulminations of religious zealots, occasionally after the manner of Ḥāfiẓ.
7 The references to the Khānlarī edition, given by Daniela Meneghini Correale in her The Ghazals of Hafez: Concordance and Vocabulary, are, for zāhid: 22: 5; 66: 8; 70: 3; 70: 11; 72: 1; 75: 8; 78: 1; 84: 7; 135: 6; 146: 6; 154: 3; 154: 6; 177: 5; 188: 11; 197: 2; 201: 4; 249: 5; 258: 8; 266: 4; 324: 7; 354: 2; 364: 2; 366: 7; 392: 9; 409: 4; 411: 5; 457: 4; 458: 5; 464: 4; 464: 12; 471: 6; and, for zāhidān: 30: 6; 115: 4; 192: 1; 290: 7.
8 One example of this must here suffice: ‘Sleep and feed have driven you far away from the degree of your Self. You will reach the degree of your Self when you become without sleep and feed.’ Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 478: 45. Cf. an identical sentiment in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (IV.4.33–35): ‘What is man / If the chief good and market of his time / Is but to sleep and feed?’ Lāhūrī (Sharḥ-i ‘irfānī-yi Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, IV, p. 2845) explains this line as follows: In the Ādāb al-murīdīn [by Abū’l-Najīb Suhrawardī, d. 563/1168], treating the subject of renouncing gluttony and satiety, it is written, ‘One who sleeps without cognizance of God is spiritually negligent [al-ghāfil]’, and Yaḥyā bin al-Mu‘ādh [d. 258/872] remarked, ‘If hunger were bought and sold in the bazaars, the seeker of the life hereafter would not be allowed to purchase any other ware’. So the poet is saying, ‘O philosopher, your sleeping without cognizance of God, on a full stomach satiated on food which is of doubtful provenance, has made you fall far away from the degree of passionate love ... but when you arrive and attain union with the Friend and become eternally subsistent through Him by means of love, then you will become without sleep and feed, for as long as you abide on the level of sleep and feed, you are but the cohort of brutes and beasts.’
9 Unlike Sanā’ī, however, Ḥāfiẓ never composed poetry solely devoted to ascetic themes (called zuhdiyyāt).
10 On the ‘witness of divine beauty in the flesh’, shāhid, mentioned some 15 times in the Dīvān, see my Prolegomenon 2, pp. 43–55. Ḥāfiẓ’s rebuke to the ascetic here has Khayyāmesque overtones, and the entire ghazal may also be usefully read as a political satire on the oppressive ruler Amīr Mubāriz al-Dīn Muẓaffar (1353–8) as well; cf. Isti‘lāmī, Dars-i Ḥāfiẓ, II, p. 1210.
11 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 471: 6.
12 Ibid., ghazal 350: 5.
13 Measure for Measure, IV.ii.8–9.
14 The Pilgrim’s Progress, pp. 83–6.
15 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 154: 3.
16 I take a cue from Lāhūrī’s grand commentary: Sharḥ-i ‘irfānī-yi ghazalhā-yi-i Ḥāfiẓ, IV, p. 2365, where he identifies the counsellor and shaykh mentioned in this ghazal (345: 5–6 here – and also elsewhere in Ḥāfiẓ’s Dīvān) with the ascetic Puritan (zāhid).
17 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 345: 5–6. Translation by Bly and Lewisohn, The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door, p. 51.
18 Referring to Zāhid-i ‘āqil, see ibid., ghazal 364: 2, discussed on the next page.
19 Ibid., ghazal 48: 4. Varā-yi ṭā‘at-i dīvānagān zi mā maṭalab. Ki shaykh-i madhhab-i mā ‘āqilī guna dānist.
20 Lāhūrī, Sharḥ-i ‘irfānī, I, pp. 207–8 correctly identifies Shaykh-i madhhab-i mā with Luqmān, mentioned in ‘Aṭṭār’s Manṭiq al-ṭayr, ed. Gawharīn, vv. 3741–52. On ‘Aṭṭār’s holy fools, see Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul, pp. 165–87.
21 Haravī, Sharḥ-i ghazalhā-yi Ḥāfiẓ, I, p. 251; Lāhūrī, Sharḥ-i ‘irfānī, I, p. 207.
22 Twelfth Night, III.ii.72–3.
23 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 385: 9. Trans. by Bly and Lewisohn, Angels, p. 22.
24 Ibid., ghazal 364: 2.
25 See the extended discussion by Murtaḍawī, Maktab-i Ḥāfiẓ, pp. 399–422 of Ḥāfiẓ’s erotic doctrine; see especially the sections on the superiority of the path of love over all other paths (pp. 406–7); the superiority of love over reason (pp. 414–15); and the topos of the ‘religion of love’ (p. 418).
26 Schimmel, ‘Reason and Mystical Experience in Islam’, pp. 142–3.
27 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 22: 5. Trans. by Bly and Lewisohn, Angels, p. 7. Lāhūrī (Sharḥ-i ‘irfānīyi Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, I, p. 428), thus commenting on this verse, explains that ‘it is through the forms of mortal beauty [suwar-i husniyya]
that God-as-Absolute in reality attracts the hearts of lovers to Himself’. See the discussion of shāhid-bāzī and naẓarbāzī in my Prolegomenon 2.
28 Cf. Lāhūrī, Sharḥ-i ‘irfānī-yi Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, I, p. 546.
29 Gulistān-i Sa'dī, ed. Khaṭīb Rahbar, II: 6, pp. 152–3.
30 Such religious mountebanks and dissembling puritan ascetics are a phenomenon of daily life in the modern-day Persianate culture of Iran and Afghanistan. Following the clerical coup d’état of 1979, there is hardly a major Iranian writer who has not depicted in detail the zāhidʼs humbug and counterfeit piety. Sa‘īdī Sīrjānī’s O Short-cuffed Men! (Ay kūta-āstīnān; for Sīrjānī’s analysis of Ḥāfiẓ’s radical anti-clericalism, see pp. 261–88; esp. 282–8) – the title being taken from a verse by Ḥāfiẓ referring to greedy mountebank dervishes (Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 426: 10b) – is one of the most famous works in this regard (with thanks to Kamran Talattof for this reference). Likewise, see the many descriptions provided by the father of modern Tajik literature, Sadriddin Aini (1878–1954), of his experience of the chicanery of seminary school teachers and their students in Bukhara, and the hypocritical zāhids and sanctimonious mullahs throughout Tajikistan in his monumental autobiography (with thanks to Ibrahim Gamard and Ravan Farhadi for this reference) – see Aini, Bukhara Reminiscences, pp. 137–47; Perry and Lehr (trans.), The Sands of Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini, pp. 145–7; 151–61; 249ff. A typical picture of a modern sanctimonious Afghan zāhid is provided by Rory Stewart in The Places in Between, pp. 217–19.
31 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 78: 1.
32 A more literal translation of the Persian phrase zāhid-i pākīza-sirisht is ‘pure-natured ascetic’. It should be underlined that this descriptive adjective was borrowed by Ḥāfiẓ from the maqṭa‘ of a ghazal, written in the same rhyme by Khwājū Kirmānī (d. 742/1342): see Dīwān-i Khwājū Kirmānī, ed. Qāni‘ī, pp. 385–6, ghazal 57: v. 9, to which Ḥāfiẓ responded here.
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 33