Pertinent here also is a verse from another of Ḥāfiẓ’s ghazals – with its reference to the ‘thread’ or ‘string’, like a strand of the Beloved’s hair, that links the entire chain of Being from the highest to lowest planes:
Zulfat hazār dil ba-yakī tār-i mū bi-bast,
Rāh-i hazār chāragar az chār-sū bi-bast.
Your tress has bound a thousand hearts within one single strand
And blocked on every side the path of a thousand
remedy-makers [who would untie such knots].16
The same ghazal invokes the intoxicated samā‘:
Muṭrib chi parda sākht, ki dar parda-yi samā‘
Bar ahl-i wajd u ḥāl dar-i hāy i hū! bibast.
What curtain-tune struck up this minstrel?
Who played and drew a samā‘ curtain
Clear across the Howling Gate
Before these folk of ecstasy
And rapture.17
We thus get, from top to bottom, through the ‘string of Being’ which lowers the ‘wine’:
a) The angelic plane of immaterial celestial images where the ‘wine’ is pure light.
b) The intermediary plane where visionary mystics and poets perceive these celestial images, invisible to ordinary humans, and transmute them into visible form – as if ‘pouring wine’ – for the benefit of receptive souls (privileged painters such as Sulṭān-Muḥammad serve this spiritual purpose too, a dignity accorded to figurative artists that was foreshadowed under the Timurids, and fully recognized in the Safavid and then Mughal and finally Ottoman domains, ever since the official endorsement of figurative art, by the highest clerical and royal authorities in Tabrīz and Herāt, with Bihzād’s royal edict of appointment in 1522 AD as the maẓhar-i nawādir-i ṣuwar, or ‘manifestation of the rarities of the image-configurations’).
c) The intoxicating effect of the thickening, visible ‘wine’.
d) The tipsy singers and musicians responding to the ‘wine’.
e) The dancers to the music and song inspired by the ‘wine’.
f) The exhausted dancers sinking into the spiritual ‘annihilation’ or fanā’ of the mystical ecstasy induced by the ‘wine’.
Stuart Cary Welch liked to emphasize the contrast in artistic temperament between painters of the late fifteenth-century School of Herāt, classical and restrained, but as fire under ice, and the more openly flamboyant and expressionist masters of the late fifteenth-century Tabrīz School. Shāh Ismā‘īl’s conquests by 1510 AD united both princely cities under Safavid rule. Manuscripts such as this great 1526–7 Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ brought together one of the most gifted living Herātī masters of the age, Shaykh-Zāda, and a supreme Tabrīzī master, Sulṭān-Muḥammad, in a magnificent combination of pictorial art not unworthy of the poet they ‘illustrate’.
Any discussion of the erotic theology and mystical symbolism underlying the illustrations of Ḥāfiẓ during this period would be incomplete without addressing the theme of the Sophianic feminine in Persian miniature painting. In respect to both metaphysics and aesthetics, the notion of the divine feminine underpins the entire Sufi doctrine of the theophany of the beloved in Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry. The most extraordinary depiction of this favourite theme of Persian neo-Platonic Sufi writers18 is found in the two pictures to which we shall now turn:
a) ‘Majnūn First Sees Laylī in the Mosque-School within the Prayer-Niche’, by Bihzād or his fellow-painter Qāsim ‘Alī, Herāt, 1494 AD; illustration to a Khamseh of Niẓāmī; British Library, Or. 68100, folio 106 verso.
b) ‘Lady Beloved within the Prayer-Niche, Holding A Sprig of Narcissi’, by Muḥammadī of Herāt, ca. 1565 D; detached album leaf; Soudavar collection, on loan to the Sackler Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Although neither of these thematically related pictures directly ‘illustrates’ the Dīvān of Ḥāfiẓ, both of them reflect indirectly – and very pertinently – the central doctrines of Ḥāfiẓian love mysticism. Sixteenth-century court artists of the Persianate world (including Turkey and India) took into their ken the entire accepted Persian literary canon, as this had fully crystallized in the expected curriculum of educated élites by the close of the fifteenth century. This canon included both Ḥāfiẓ and the earlier poet whose narrative imagery arguably most profoundly inspired him, Niẓāmī. As Alessandro Bausani has famously observed, Niẓāmī’s literary characters – the Lady of the Red Pavilion, the lovers Laylī and Majnūn, the partners in the love triangle Shīrīn, Farhād and Khusraw Parvīz – turned into quasi-Platonic Archetypes in the perceptions of later Persian, Indo-Persian and Turkish poets and their illustrators. To Niẓāmī’s archetypes should be added the poet ‘Attār’s configuration of the Beloved as a Byzantine princess adored by the Shaykh Ṣan‘ān. Ḥāfiẓ openly compares himself in one ghazal to Shaykh San‘ān,19 and repeatedly refers to himself as a ‘Farhād’20 and especially as a ‘Majnūn’.21 It logically follows that where Ḥāfiẓ calls himself ‘Ṣan‘ān’, ‘Farhād’ or ‘Majnūn’, then the poet’s implied Beloved is the Lady Beloved, more properly, the Divine perceived by the faithful under the aspect of the Sophianic feminine – as in this verse:
Dawr-i Majnūn guzasht u nawbat-i mā-st,
Har kasī panj rūza nawbat-i ū-st.
Majnūn’s turn has passed, and now it’s mine,
And every five-day character’s own turn
Upon this earth.22
The focus of Majnūn’s mystical meditation is the female manifestation of the Divinity. Niẓāmī’s famous narrative poem makes it as limpidly clear as medieval Persian allegory can bear that the Lady Laylī mirrors the Godhead. When Majnūn throws himself upon Laylī’s tomb at the end of the romance, the distraught lover explicitly addresses his departed Beloved as the Dizh-Bānū, ‘my Lady of the Castle’; that is, Niẓāmī deliberately assimilates the Arabian Beloved to another of his own literary creations, the Lady of the Red Pavilion (in the Haft Paykar and the ultimate source of Puccini’s Turandot): an allegory of the Divine who hides within the fastness of Her fortress as the Queen of the Other World, and who chooses through an icon suspended over Her gate to manifest Herself unto human lovers, posing through the icon the riddle of Her combined invisible Transcendance and visible Immanence, and so drives Her lovers mad to the point of courting death.
The mystical imagery of classical Persian Sufi epic – and lyrical – poetry thus can most definitely configure the Divine Beloved as a female. That this is so lies beyond all denial in the case of Niẓāmī’s celebrated heroines and their literary derivatives, although, in other poets, ambiguity lurks, as Shabistarī in his Garden of Mystery (Gulshan-i rāz) so well puts it:
Hadīth-i zulf-i jānān bas darāz ast,
Chi shāyad guft az ān? K-ān jāy-i rāz ast.
Long is the story of the loved one’s curls
And what should we say thereof? There lurks the secret.23
In turn, relentlessly to translate Ḥāfiẓ’s ‘Friend’ (yār) as a masculine Beloved finds justifications in equivocal Persian neuters, Platonic precedent, the grammar of much Arabic and Urdu poetry, and of course on historical grounds in awareness of the traditional civilization’s segregation between the sexes, and social acceptance of boy-love (as with the celebrated fondness of Sultan Maḥmūd for his page Ayāz24). But to resort everywhere to exclusively male pronouns flies in the face of clear references to the Lady Laylī, to Queen Shīrīn, or even to the Sīmurgh (a legendary fowl not only feminine in Avestic, but in numerous medieval Islamic miniatures that unmistakeably depict Her as a mother-bird carrying the hero Zāl to Her nest, to Her chicks, and to Her unhatched eggs).
Conversely, one might argue that it was the sheer difficulty of access to female society, for adult males in this poet’s culture, that enhanced the very mystery and poetic power of the symbolism of the Veil.25 Servile page-boys might availably pour wine at male lords’ dinner parties, but countless classical Persian verses stress the remoteness of the hidden a
nd desired Lady as the Hidden One, dwelling with mystical rapture on the idea of the sudden revelation of the Beloved’s features emerging from Her Veil. In such a cultural context, that is really feminine imagery.
The Veil (ḥijāb, niqāb, parda) need not refer only to the Lady’s outdoor garment, but may also mean Her night-dark tresses that frame her countenance sparkling like unto moonlight (mirroring the sunlike Divine). Although the pronoun’s gender remains a matter of choice, Charles-Henri de Fouchécour’s already (and deservedly) classic translation of Ḥāfiẓ could, I think, feminize the Beloved of ghazal 216, where She intermittently, teasingly and cruelly snatches Her Veiling Tresses from Her Lover’s grasp and hides Her countenance behind them, in verbal play upon the mystical notion of iltibās or ‘veiling’ – as if She were, indeed, the Lady of the Red Pavilion:
Chū dast bar sar-i zulfash zanam, bi tāb ravad!
Var āshtī ṭalabam, bā sar-i ‘itāb ravad!
Chū māh-i naw, rah-yi nazzārigān-i bīchāra
Zanad bi gūsha-yi abrū u dar niqāb ravad!
When I carry my hand to the tip of Her curl,
She angrily seethes!
If peace I implore, then She utterly blames me!
Like a new moon, she waylays Her gazers wretchéd
With a cut from Her eyebrow’s corner –
Then hides again within Her Veil!26
When the Veil lifts, a further arresting image struck in Ḥāfiẓ’s verse is the miḥrāb-like shape that the lover perceives in the twin-arched eyebrows of the Beloved’s countenance. The metaphor signifies unmistakeably the mystery of tajallī, the Divine ‘epiphany’: the Beloved’s face is the direction towards which the true devotee must turn, like the Koranic angels once commanded by the Lord to worship the human form as the supreme locus of God’s chosen visible manifestation. Ḥāfiẓ writes in another ghazal:
Dar ṣawma‘a-yi zāhid u khalvat-i Ṣūfī,
Juz’ gūsha-yi abrū-yi Tu, miḥrāb-i du‘ā nīst.
In the hermit’s retreat and Sufi’s lone abode,
Save in your Eyebrow’s corner, no prayer’s miḥrāb exists!27
Or again in a different verse from this ghazal:
Namāz dar kham-i ān abrūān-i miḥrābī
Kasī kunad ki bi khūn-i jigar ṭahārat kard.
Prays to those eyebrows’ mihrāb-like curve
One who washes for worship in heart’s blood.28
Fouchécour here aptly comments: ‘La voûte est faite des sourcils de l’Aimé. Les sourcils sont le mihrab de l’amant.’29 Now, this poetic tradition of the Beloved’s brows and countenance explicitly assimilated to a miḥrāb is no mere literary conceit but a driving Sufi spiritual symbol,30 and found its chief visual expression in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Persianate pictorial art, in the convention of representing Laylī Herself, an outstanding female focus of tajallī if ever there was one, seated within the very arch of the prayer-niche of the mosque wherein Qays, the future Majnūn, first beholds Her. When called upon in 1494 AD at the court of Herāt to illustrate in Niẓāmī’s romance the very moment (encapsulated in the page’s calligraphy) when a gust of wind ‘blows the Veil from Her own Beauty’ (Burqa‘ zi jamāli khwīsh bar-dāsht), the artist (probably Bihzād) depicted his Laylī ensconced within the very heart of the miḥrāb, with a Koranic quotation (3:39) inscribed in ‘tilework’ calligraphy directly above Her:
Wa huwa qā’im-un yuṣallī fī-l-miḥrāb
Upright he standeth who prayeth towards [literally ‘in’] the miḥrāb.
The upright devotee in the painting is young Qays himself, who beholds and recognizes the female tajallī in the miḥrāb and dips his stylus into his inkwell to write his very first mystical love poem in Her praise: as the ‘Majnūn’, he will of course be the archetypal dervish poet, a rôle and rank to which Ḥāfiẓ, in turn, explicitly claims succession.31 Majnūn’s Beloved is, of course, the Lady.
The Laylī-in-the-miḥrāb motif recurs in a number of extant fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings, not only as direct illustrations to Niẓāmī or his imitators, but as individual album leaves. The version in the Soudavar collection by Muḥammadī of Herāt, painted in about 1565 AD, is an interesting variant of an earlier image (now in the Harvard Fogg Museum) drawn in Tabrīz in about 1540 AD, and attributed by S.C. Welch32 to Sulṭān-Muḥammad’s son Mīrzā ‘Alī. In Muḥammadī’s slightly later version, all the tradition’s pictorial and ultimately poetic and mystical conventions come together.
Muḥammadī’s Lady is a heavenly Queen, as made clear by Her crown and also even by the kerchief dangling from Her sleeve (Islamic art almost certainly borrowed this attribute of the royal kerchief, grasped in the fist or tucked into the belt, from the mappa brandished by the consul and later even by emperors in Roman and Byzantine tradition). The twin arches of the Lady’s eyebrows are mirrored by the arch of the miḥrāb within which she sits, Muḥammadī’s significant addition to Mīrzā ‘Alī’s prototype, drawn from so many Persianate artists’ representations of Laylī. With equal mystical significance, the Lady contemplates a sprig of narcissi, symbols of human eyes, indeed of Her own eyes, as Ḥāfiẓ so often writes – as in this opening of one ghazal:
Ghulām-i nargis-i mast-i Tu tājdārān-and,
Kharāb-i bāda-yi la‘l-i Tu hūshyārān-and.
Even crownéd kings are slaves to your tipsy narcissi,
The wisest turn tavern-wrecked in your lips’ ruby-red wine.33
In conclusion, painters, poets and mystics in the Persianate tradition, whether in Iran or India, as we have seen closely, mirror each others’ meanings and deserve, indeed demand, to be studied together. Muḥammadī’s Lady contemplates Herself in the Narcissi, like the Godhead of Sufi thought contemplates the Divine Self through the very eyes of human devotees. Islamic tradition, in thought, paint and verse, in actual and utterly attestable fact (for the paintings bear irrefutable witness) ascribed the highest conceivable dignity – Divine manifestation – to the female principle. Ḥāfiẓ, as a self-proclaimed ‘Majnūn’, does so too. Such dignity should not be obscured in either studies or translations today. To quote an earlier contemporary of Ḥāfiẓ to whom the poet of Shīrāz owed a considable literary debt, Khwājū Kirmānī:
Zi ṣūrat bibar tā bi ma‘nī rasī, / Chū Majnūn shavī, khwud bi Laylī rasī!
Now through the icon pass! until you reach the MEANING:
Be like to a Majnūn! Hie yourself now and reach
Unto the Lady Laylī.34
Notes
1 The mainly connoisseurly and stylistic approach to Persian art of twentieth-century European and American scholars (Stchoukine, Pope, Gray, Robinson, Welch and his school, etc.) has helped classify materials and identify individual artists, indispensable tasks to be sure, but the three eminent modern Iranian scholars pointing the way to profounder decipherment of their own artistic tradition – in light of its literary, royal and religious symbolism – have been Chahryar Adle (inter alia, Art et société dans le monde iranien, Paris 1982); Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani (inter alia, Le chant du monde: L’Art de l’Iran safavide, Paris 2007); and Abolala Soudavar (inter alia, Art of the Persian Courts, New York 1992). This writer cannot overstate his debt to such masters and also to many conversations with Dr Reza Feyz in my own Figurative Art in Medieval Islam and the Riddle of Bihzād of Herāt (AD 1465–535), New York and Paris 2004.
2 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 194: 404.
3 It formerly belonged in the Stuart Cary Welch collection in Cambridge (Massachussetts), but is now dispersed between the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; the Metropolitan Musem of Art in New York City; and the new Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar. See Stuart Cary Welch, Persian Painting: Five Royal Safavid Manuscripts of the Sixteenth Century, New York 1976, and S.C. Welch (with Sheila Canby and Norah Titley), Wonders of the Age.
4 Welch, Wonders of the Age, no. 42, p. 123.
5 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānla
rī, ghazal 194: 404. This and other translations from the Persian are mine. See also Fouchécour, Hafiz de Chiraz, pp. 545–7. Dickson’s no. 199 is after the Ghanī and Qazvīnī 1941 edition.
6 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 36: 88 (no. 35 in the Ghanī and Qazvīnī edition).
7 Ibid., ghazal 35: 86 (no. 34 in the Ghanī and Qazvīnī edition). In Khānlarī’s edition, instead of āshiyāna-yi tust, the variant reading āstāna-yi tust is printed, although six of his manuscripts feature the former lectio that appears in the painting.
8 Ibid., ghazal 297: 4b, p. 610.
9 Wonders of the Age, p. 125, no. 42.
10 Gift of S.C. Welch, now co-owned by the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
11 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 413: 842 (no. 422 in the Ghanī and Qazvīnī edition). See also Fouchécour, Hafiz de Chiraz, no. 413, pp. 1020–2.
12 Dīvān-i Ḥāfiẓ, ed. Khānlarī, ghazal 192: 3, p. 400.
13 Ibid., ghazal 413: 3, p. 842.
14 Ibid., ghazal 413: 10, p. 842.
15 Ibid., ghazal 413: 1, p. 842.
16 Ibid., ghazal 32: 1, p. 80.
17 Ibid., ghazal 32: 6, p. 80.
18 [See Austin, ‘The Sophianic Feminine in the Work of Ibn ‘Arabī and Rumi’ – Ed.]
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry Page 39