Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

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save grace and comeliness

in our scriptural exegesis.^24

This same theophany of beauty also cast its ray upon Ḥāfiẓ’s verse, gleams of which

were reflected through various poetic images such as ‘Idol’ (but), ‘Christian child’

(tarsā-bachchih), ‘Magian child’ (mugh-bachchih), ‘Cup-bearer’ (sāqī) and ‘Friend’

(yār). When these images are apprehended by any reader attuned to Ḥāfiẓ’s

symbolic universe, they arouse intoxication and selflessness, freeing one from

conceit, self-centredness and egotism. Thus, in the following verse in hisDīvān, we

see how the ‘Magian child’ appears to rob the poet of his egocentric faith and

initiate him into love’s esoteric creed:

Just when the Magi’s child strolled along (the thief

of hearts and wrecker of belief)

At once the Muslim puritan was carried off,

from all his friends divorced himself.^25

Ḥāfiẓ’s religion of love teaches devotion to that essential Beauty whose loveliness
reappears time and time again in the guise of various symbols among other Sufi
poets.^26 This is particularly evident in the lines from the followingghazal, which is
one of the most famous erotic poems in all of Persian literature:

Her hair was still tangled, her mouth drunk

And laughing, her shoulders sweaty, the blouse

Torn open, singing love songs, her hand holding a wine cup.

Her eyes were looking for a drunken brawl, her mouth

Full of jibes. And this being sat down

Last night at midnight on my bed.

She put her lips close to my ear and said

In a mournful whisper these words: ‘What is this?

Aren’t you my old lover – Are you asleep?’

The friend of wisdom who receives

This wine that steals sleep is a traitor to love

If he doesn’t worship that same wine.^27

As the last stanza indicates, Ḥāfiẓ professes that anyone who does not revel in

drinking the wine of love is a heretic and traitor to love’s creed (kāfar-i‘ishq). This

statement makes better sense if we decode the reference to wine as being

metaphorical of the theophany of beauty in the raiment of mortal beings.

In the most important mystical commentary on theDīvānof Ḥāfiẓ, written by Sayf

ḤāfiẓandtheReligionofLoveinClassicalPersianPoetry