Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

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Where’s one master exegete

ofEroswhose lore suffices

to crack the code of its complexities?^15

In anotherghazal, he delineates the above distinction between the esoteric creed of

love and exoteric Islam in greater detail:

Get lost! The lover’ssectaamorisis the reverse

Of other faiths and creeds, for from the one you love

Untruth and perfidy beats kindness and sincerity,

Her fabrications inspirations, her sin all gratuity,

All ill from her is just, her taunts all right and meet,

Her temple is the Ka‘ba, silk-soft her adamant.

The nettle’s sting from her I think is better than

Rose petals and sweet basil. If scoffers then poke fun

And say: ‘It’s deviant – this crooked creed you’ve got!’

Reply: ‘Her eyebrow is my creed. I bid for it

And laid down life for this – the “creed of crookedness”!

It’s all I need, I’ll waste no words. Go read the rest in silence.’^16

We find him again extolling in a quatrain the superiority of love’s ‘crooked creed’

over the so-called ‘straight’ way of formalistic Islam:

Her tresses’ tip our fetish-cult

And eye that’s drunk and impudent –

That is the creed which we adopt.

They say that healthy piety is something else,

Assert sound faith is different, aside from these,

But from their ‘sound faith’ and ‘creed of wholesomeness’,

We choose her deviant, uneven ways and crookedness.^17

This same strict distinction and difference between the formal creed of Islam and
the higher transcendental religion of love is reaffirmed by Rūmī in a number of
other quatrains in hisDīvānas well. In the following two quatrains, he maintains
that love’s esoteric faith supersedes conventional religion and is something apart
from the other world’s traditional sects:

Erotomaniacs is what we are: lovesots;

The Muslims they’re a different lot. We’re spindly ants;

King Solomon’s another sort. A burning, aching heart

And sallow faces seek of us: the abattoir’s on a different street.^18

ḤāfiẓandtheReligionofLoveinClassicalPersianPoetry