Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

relish the spirit and convey the taste of this wine and also to give a small glimmer
of the grandeur of the sublime station of love in his verse, it must suffice here to
cite the two opening and two concluding verses of this poem:

In memory of the beloved

we drank a wine;

we were drunk with it

before the creation of the vine.

The full moon its glass, the wine

a sun circled by a crescent;

when it is mixed

how many stars appear.

Its two final verses are:

For there is no life in this world

for one who lives here sober;

who does not die drunk on it,

prudence has passed him by.

So let him weep for himself,

one who wasted his life

never having won a share

or measure of this wine.^14

Over the rest of this period of what might be called ‘the Golden Age of Classical
Persian Literature’ – the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries – the ‘Religion of
Love’ (madhhab-i‘ishq) became increasingly celebrated in verse by major poets such
as Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/1273), Sa‛dī (d. circa 691/1292) and Ḥāfiẓ. Their contri-
butions to this central current of Islamic erotic spirituality is discussed below.

TheReligionofLoveinRūmī

It will be worthwhile to explore Rūmī’s own understanding of this transcendental
madhhab-i‘ishq, since he devotes so many verses of his ecstatic poetry to claiming
that the religion of love transcends not only Islam, but every other religion as well.
He thus begins one longghazalannouncing the supra-Islamic nature of Eros as
follows:

In the summa ofAmor

where’s the idiom of Islam?

ḤāfiẓandtheSchoolofLoveinClassicalPersianPoetry 81