Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

ThePrimordialDispositionofManandtheReligionofLove

According to the Qur’ān, man was created with an ‘original disposition that God
instilled within him’ (fiṭratAllāh) and formed with a ‘fundamentally immutable God-
given nature’ (lā-tabdīlli-khalqi’llāhi:XXX: 30). Basing themselves on this evidence
from their holy scripture, Persian poets drove this classical theological doctrine up
several theosophical notches higher, maintaining that man’s nature had been
already moulded and framed to develop according to the nature of the divine attrib-
utes of Beauty, Truth and Goodness, and inclined to follow the ‘Straight Path of Love
and Mercy’ (‘ishq,maḥabbat,raḥmat) long before birth. As human beings, we thus
enter the world with faith in the divine innately deposited within the depths of our
selves, for, according to the Prophet’s renowned saying: ‘Every child is born accord-
ing to his original disposition [fiṭra]; then his parents make him into a Jew, a
Christian, or a Zoroastrian.’^43
Therefore, in the narrow sectarian sense of the word, no one is ‘born’ a Muslim^44

• much less a Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Jew or Zoroastrian – but rather every per-
  son is moulded into becoming a ‘believer’ subject to the influence of their parents,
  wider society and cultural environment. At the same time, it should be emphasized
  that all these faiths, setting aside the excrescences, excesses and superfluities to
  which each has been heir, is quintessentially moulded according to that same God-
  given ‘original disposition’ within humankind. Thus, all the world’s religions may be
  viewed as divergent manifestations of that one primordial faith of man – that is, the
  religion of his original disposition (fiṭra).
  Each of these faiths, having its own fair share of opportunistic power-seeking,
  theological deviance, sanctimonious cant, snobbish bias, hypocritical pretence, unc-
  tuous piety, priggish affectation and bigoted prejudice, along with a host of other
  vices, has become separated from and spurned its sister, considering its fellow trav-
  ellers in the realms of Faith as damned – apostates, infidels or heretics, destined for
  Hades and Gehenna. Nonetheless, in every religion one can always find a small
  number of true adepts, saints and men of God, who are its spiritually realized gnos-
  tics and poets who are attuned to the Divine. Among this elect company one finds
  few divergences and disagreements save in respect to terminological expressions
  and modes of ritual practice pertaining to incidental forms of exoteric dogma,
  which are irrelevant to the quintessential reality of their faith. The true believers
  within every religion, as Rūmī puts it, are like rays of a single lamp:

If ten lamps are together in one place

each one is different from the next in form.

You cannot tell apart the light of each

when you are looking at them, there is no doubt.^45

Whatever their exterior denomination, the soul and spirit of the faithful reflects
their insight into God’s comprehensive mercy which encompasses and embraces
all men, good and ill alike:

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