(Persian verse): She showed her face, and herself described her face; / since things are so, why does it hurt my heart?
Throughout this introduction, Davānī assumes that these two perspectives – the concealment of the secret of love, and its revelation – frame the character of poetry around the interaction of the lover and the beloved. He adduces additional proof from the ḥadīth of the Prophet, particularly the well-known saying, ‘I was a hidden treasure, and I longed to be known’, which makes the manifestation of the universe the result of the divine self-disclosure.
Davānī then inserts another digression which he calls a reminder (tadhkira), devoted to the concept of love as that which joins together extremes and unites opposites. Love achieves these goals both by concealing secrets and by giving indications that remove veils. He explains these ambiguities as usual with illustrative verses:
(Persian verse): His eyebrow says no, but his eyes say yes!
(Persian verse): That longing is worth a hundred souls when the lover / says ‘I don’t want to’, but wants to with a hundred souls.
Davānī goes on, in a passage dense with allusions to Sufi doctrines, to describe how this cosmic role of love encompasses the unfolding emanation of the different levels of existence, and their perfection which is attained through the Seal of the Prophets, that is, Muḥammad. This passage links the cosmic role of the Prophet Muḥammad with his experience of heavenly ascension, described in the Qur’ān (53:9) as approaching ‘two bows’ lengths or nearer’ to the divine presence. Davānī qualifies the two arcs (qaws) of the ‘bows’ lengths’ as comprising the prophetic role in cosmic manifestation (ẓuhūr) and the saintly degree of consciousness (shu‘ūr). This permits him to connect the notion of gradual manifestation and unveiling with ‘the Seal of the Saints’, the esoteric figure whose advent had been proclaimed by al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī and whose role was claimed by Ibn ‘Arabī. Davānī is fully aware of the messianic implications of this linkage, citing in support the well-known prophetic ḥadīth on the coming of one who shall ‘fill the earth with justice and equity as it is now filled with oppression and injustice’. The approach of the apocalypse means that overflowing revelation is available everywhere, including in poetry:
Since the time of the manifestation of that holy one draws near, the annunciation of those lights increase daily in display and manifestation, and the proofs of the truth of this claim are established on the page of time’s conditions, if anyone with an insightful glance looks closely. For the grace of flowing geniuses and the close capacity of most of the children of the time is advanced in relation to their fathers, and their ambitions likewise by the same relation, again by the benefits of the approaching time of the revered inheritor and master of time [i.e., the expected messiah], as the saying goes (Arabic verse): ‘the Earth has a portion of the cup of generosity.’ The secrets of gnosis are pronounced on every tongue, and the shout is raised of the original aim of reality, in accordance with the voices of differing capabilities.
The secret of God, which the gnostic traveller tells to no one – / I am amazed where the wine sellers heard it from. [Ḥāfiẓ]26
And since the perfection of consciousness [ish‘ār, a pun on ash‘ār, ‘verses’] is from the special characteristics of the creation of the Seal [of the Saints], those who resort to the deserts of annihilation in explanation of the realities of joy, having taken the path of poetic similitudes, express sublime intentions with the customary images of rogues with shameless cheeks.27
To demonstrate his point that poetry is the expression of mystical truths, Davānī then quotes in support two verses from the famous wine ode (al-Khamriyya) of the master of Arabic mystical poetry, Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 1235). As with his other quotations, Davānī does not bother to provide the author’s name, assuming that the reader will be familiar with it.
At this point, Davānī shifts into a quick allegorical exposition of the frequently appearing images of non-Muslim religious groups (‘infidels’) that appear so often in Persian poetry:28
The wayfarer at the beginning of the path, who is concerned with the perfection of the soul, has both himself and God in view. From this perspective, whoever wants to bring himself to God in this way has a relationship with the Magi [majūs], who believe in light and darkness. Both himself and the light of God are his contemplation, and by the very same expression, they call the seeker a Zoroastrian [gabr], as is the case in the poetry of Mawlana Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī. Like this expression, sometimes they call him a Christian, since he affirms the reality of himself, God, and his own seeking and concentration, just as the Christians believe in the Trinity. And they call the station of love the tavern, considering that in this degree the constraint of dividing into self and the other is removed from the character of the gnostic...29
Having established this principle of poetic symbolism, Davānī goes on to comment on the image of the cup that represents the heart, adding several other Persian verses by Ḥāfiẓ in support, and referring explicitly to the poetry of Fakhr al-Dīn ‘Irāqī as an example of the same symbolic principle. This remark concludes the ‘reminder’ passage, after which the commentary proper can begin.
It is apparent that this second treatise by Davānī is based on a more thoroughgoing hermeneutical framework than the first treatise, in which he had simply outlined the possibilities of three complementary perspectives on a particular verse by Ḥāfiẓ. To be sure, the first treatise is also firm in insisting on the principle of metonymy, in which a term used in a poem is considered to be a symbol for an underlying spiritual reality. The metaphysical assumptions underlying the second text are more technical and, indeed, esoteric, relying upon long traditions of philosophical and mystical reflection, and intertextual reference. It is noteworthy that Davānī here asserts that poetry must be read not only in terms of the dialectic of secrecy and disclosure, but also in relation to mystical teachings about the consciousness of the Prophet Muḥammad, the esoteric figure of the Seal of the Saints, and the universal impact of the coming advent of the expected messiah. This is of course the very same hermeneutic that Davānī would bring to bear on any other text, including the Qur’ān.
Enough has been said so far to make it clear how Davānī approaches the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ, and for reasons of space I will not attempt to go through his exposition of the details of the lyric that is explored in the second treatise, fascinating though these interpretations are. Nor will I linger on the third treatise in the anthology of Davānī’s writings on Ḥāfiẓ, which is extremely short and basically uses a single verse as a springboard for arguing the doctrine of predestination.30 Instead, I would like to turn briefly to an issue of historical or narrative interpretation that is also offered by Davānī, who clearly assumes that the verses of Ḥāfiẓ were written ‘in the form of describing his own state [bi-ṣūrat-i vaṣf al-ḥāl-i khwud]’.
While commenting on a variation of the saying attributed to Jesus, that one should not present wisdom before the unworthy, Davānī recalls the story that he heard from a dervish, who maintained that Ḥāfiẓ was a disciple of a Sufi master. The name of the master is given as Shaykh Maḥmūd ‘Aṭṭār, who is described as an outstanding Sufi of his time. The same source maintained that, during a visit to the shrine of Shaykh Ibn Khafīf in Shīrāz, he encountered a master there who was deeply immersed in the teachings of Shaykh Rūzbihān Baqlī. When the narrator described Shaykh Maḥmūd ‘Aṭṭār, his interlocutor replied that that was his own master. Davānī concludes that this is the justification for commentators to explain the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ in terms of his spiritual states. Most modern scholars have focused on this account as a piece of historical evidence to be considered in deciding upon the facticity of Ḥāfiẓ’s connection to Sufism, or else its refutation.31 Frequent attempts have been made to link the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ with the Sufi teachings of Rūzbihān.32
Yet it is interesting to see the accompanying hermeneutical argument that Davānī adds al
ongside this ostensibly historical account:
Secondly, there is that which most of the literati say about some of the states of the author [Ḥāfiẓ], which are on the lips of the people. ‘And God has insight into the conditions of his servants.’ They have understood his words in the same external meanings that no intellectual would consider it legitimate to restrict to those suppositions. They have placed the finger of astonishment on the teeth of thought from the interpretation of [his verses] by the likes of these spiritual realities. They are completely ignorant of the contents of ‘Don’t look at who speaks, look at what is spoken’, and the meaning of ‘Know the man by the truth, not the truth by the man’.33 And if it is assumed that the intelligent person has in no way even a glimmering of truth in relation to this meaning, the derivation of these meanings from him is the ultimate manifestation and distinction, and the source of insight. The possessor of a spiritual state has spiritual states as a result of that. If someone charges himself, he knows without a hint of doubt or imagination that from [the vendor’s cry of] ‘Country thyme!’ [sa‘tar barrī] he hears, ‘Open up and see my piety’ [as‘a tara birrī].34 For that reason, he is overwhelmed with ecstasy, by the latter path, for which parallel meanings may be discovered for the likes of these sayings.35
While the argument is a trifle convoluted, I take this to mean that, first of all, ordinary people have understood the verses of Ḥāfiẓ in the most external and literal sense. Yet if someone knows nothing of the spiritual meanings of such expressions, and yet nevertheless discovers them through accidental similarity, this is in reality a genuine source of insight and, indeed, ecstasy. There are numerous examples of such ‘accidental’ discoveries in Sufi lore. Yet the implication is that the legitimacy of the mystical interpretation of Ḥāfiẓ does not in fact rest upon the argument from authority, which asserts the historical connection of Ḥāfiẓ with the Sufi tradition through actual initiation. It rather rests upon the adventitious and even serendipitous discovery of inner meanings, which by their very nature point to the insight of the listener rather than being dependent upon the intention of the writer.
I have suggested elsewhere that Sufi poetry is not defined by the author so much as by the audience.36 For a reader such as Davānī, the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ exists on a continuum that ranges from Sufis such as Ḥallāj and ‘Ayn al-Quḍāt to the philosopher Ibn Sīnā,37 and the profane Abbasid court poet Abū Nuwās.38 For him, it was just as natural and inevitable to employ a Sufi hermeneutic for the poetry of Ḥāfiẓ as it was for Sa‘īd al-Dīn Farghānī (d. 701/1301), Ṣadr al-Dīn Qunawī (d. 752/1351), or ‘Abd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1143/1731) to write detailed mystical commentaries on the Arabic poems of Ibn Fāriḍ.39 Davānī is clearly an advocate of the systematic interpretation of poetry by a metaphysical system of correspondences based on writers such as Ibn ‘Arabī and Suhrawardī, and for this he has been criticized for not respecting the clear sense of the text of Ḥāfiẓ.40 Whether or not Ḥāfiẓ would have appreciated or approved of the philosophical and mystical interpretations which have been brought to his verses, the testimony of Davānī makes it abundantly clear that such interpretations have been present among the readers of Ḥāfiẓ from a very early date.
Notes
1 Ehsan Yarshater, ‘Hafez I. An Overview’, EIr, XI, pp. 464–5.
2 Franklin Lewis, ‘Hafez, VIII. Hafez and Rendi’, EIr, XI, pp. 483–91.
3 A useful overview of the metaphysical views of Davānī was provided in an early article by Mehmed Ali Ayni, ‘Note sur l’idéalisme de Djelaleddin Davānī’, pp. 236–40.
4 Reza Pourjavady, ‘Kitāb-shināsi-i āthār-i Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’, pp. 81–139; see especially items numbered 8–14, pp. 90–4, and the author’s remarks on p. 91. One of these commentaries (Pourjavady, no. 8) has also been discussed by Terry Graham, ‘Hafiz and His Master’, pp. 35–40.
5 Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī Kāzarūnī, Naqd-i niyāzī, dar sharḥ-i do bayt u yik ghazal az Khwājah Ḥāfiẓ.
6 Ibid., p. 44.
7 See the comments on the ahl-e waḥdat (‘monists’) in Herman Landolt, ‘Nasafī, ‘Azīz b. Moḥammad’, Encyclopaedia Iranica www.iranica.com/newsite/articles/unicode/sup/Nasafi_Aziz.html.
8 Davānī, Naqd, pp. 44–5.
9 See Ch. Pellat, ‘Kināya’, EI2, V, pp. 116–18.
10 Davānī, Naqd, pp. 45–7.
11 See Hâfez de Chiraz, Le Divân, trans. Fouchécour, pp. 19–20, 113–14, 160.
12 Davānī, Naqd, p. 64.
13 Ibid., p. 67.
14 Ibid., p. 68.
15 Ibid., p. 71.
16 Ibid., p. 72.
17 Ibid., p. 74.
18 In the Islamic tradition, Isrāfīl figures as an angel of death, and in particular the angel who blows the trumpet on the Day of Resurrection.
19 Davānī, Naqd, p. 76. The last sentence paraphrases the famous opening lines of the first chapter of Ibn ‘Arabī’s Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam: ‘The Reality wanted to see the essence of His Most Beautiful Names or, to put it in another way, to see His own Essence, in an all-inclusive object encompassing the whole [divine] Command, which, qualified by existence, would reveal to Him His own mystery. For the seeing of a thing, itself by itself, is not the same as it seeing itself in another, as it were in a mirror; for it appears to itself in a form that is invested by the location of the vision by that which would only appear to it given the existence of the location and its [the location’s] self-disclosure to it’ (Ibn al-‘Arabī, The Bezels of Wisdom, trans. Austin, p. 50).
20 Davānī, Naqd, pp. 172–5.
21 This verse can be found in Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 258: 7.
22 Ibid., ghazal 2: 3.
23 Ibid., ghazal 136: 6.
24 Ibid., ghazal 266: 4 (reading zāhid instead of ṣūfī).
25 Ibid., ghazal 163: 8.
26 Ibid., ghazal 238: 8.
27 Davānī, Naqd, p. 178.
28 On which, see Alessandro Bausani, Storia della letteratura persiana, pp. 247, 263–9; Lewisohn, ‘Sufi Symbolism and the Persian Hermeneutic Tradition: Reconstructing the Pagoda of Attar’s Esoteric Poetics’, pp. 255–308.
29 Davānī, Naqd, p. 179.
30 Ibid., pp. 266–74.
31 Akbar Sobūt, ‘Pīr-i Gol-rang’, Encyclopedia of the World of Islam, 5: 381.
32 For a recent attempt to link Ḥāfiẓ to Rūzbihān, see the useful article by ‘Alī Sharīat Kāshānī, ‘La prééternité et la pérennité de l’amour et de la beauté en literature mystique persane de Rūzbehān à Ḥāfeẓ’, pp. 25–54.
33 Two sayings commonly attributed to ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib.
34 For this celebrated example of the Sufi doctrine of listening (samā‘), which befell Abū Ḥulmān in Baghdad, see al-Sarrāj al-Ṭūsī, Kitāb al-luma‘ fi’l-taṣawwuf, p. 289, line 9; Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn, Book 18.3, p. 1145 (in this edition, the second expression erroneously repeats the first); Duncan Black MacDonald, ‘Emotional Religion in Islam’, JRAS (1901–2, part 1), pp. 195–252, citing p. 238. Ghazālī states the underlying principle as follows: ‘meanings that predominate in the heart precede in the understanding, despite the words.’ For further on this theme, see Lewisohn, ‘The Sacred Music of Islam: Samā‘ in the Persian Sufi Tradition’, pp. 1–33, esp. pp. 18–19.
35 Davānī, Naqd, p. 193.
36 Ernst, The Shambhala Guide to Sufism, chap. 6.
37 Davānī, Naqd, pp. 216–17.
38 Ibid., p. 81.
39 Dāwūd ibn Maḥmūd Qayṣarī, Sharḥ Ṭā’iyyat Ibn al-Fāriḍ al-kubrá; and Ṭā’iyyah-i ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Jāmī: tarjumah-i Ṭā’iyyah-i Ibn Fāriḍ, bi-inḍimām-i sharḥ-i Maḥmūd Qayṣārī bar Ṭā’iyyah-i Ibn Fāriḍ; Farghānī, Mashāriq al-ḍararī; Dermenghem, trans., L’Eloge du vin (Al khamriya): poème mystique de ‘Omar ibn al Faridh, et son commentaire par ‘Abd al Ghani an Nabolosi. Davānī quotes Ibn al-Fāriḍ in Naqd, p. 71 (see note, p.
93), p. 178 (see note, p. 216).
40 Fouchécour, Le Divân, p. 20.
PART IV
ḤĀFIẒ’S ROMANTIC IMAGERY AND LANGUAGE OF LOVE
The Allegory of Drunkenness and the Theophany of the Beloved in Sixteenth-Century Illustrations of Ḥāfiẓ
Michael Barry
An intensely ‘Ḥāfiẓian’ ambience permeated the entire tradition of miniature painting in greater Persia during the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, but few studies yet exist of the erotic theology and mystical symbolism that sustained the aesthetic premises of this tradition and underpinned later Persian coded conventions of manuscript illustration under the Jalayirid, Timurid, Turcoman and Safavid dynasties.1 This is especially true of the four illustrations discussed below, two of which directly illustrate a ghazal2 from the most beautiful known manuscript of the Dīvān, probably produced for Prince Sām Mīrzā, brother to Shāh Ṭahmāsb, in Safavid-ruled Herāt (in present-day Afghanistan) in 1526/7 AD.3
The first painting, which was explicitly created by way of illustration–homage to Ḥāfiẓ, was the work of the renowned miniaturist Shaykh-Zāda, probably painted in Herāt circa 1526 or 1527 AD. Scholars have entitled this miniature, quite appropriately adorning the cover of the present volume devoted to the theme of the ‘Religion of Love’ in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry, as Incident in a Mosque. Here we see a preacher addressing the faithful in conventional words, while a member of the congregation intuitively grasps the inner truth of the sermon’s words, and falls into mystical ecstasy. However, Shaykh-Zāda’s painting is not an ‘illustration’, but rather an evocation of the contrast between orthodox preachers, who defend the outward practices of religion, and ecstatic Sufis who perceive its inner truth, which Ḥāfiẓ draws throughout the Dīvān. The painter intends to convey the general mood, and symbolic thrust, of the Dīvān as a whole.
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 37