Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

In several places in the Qur’ān, allusion is made to the triad of these transcendent
qualities that bring delight to the heart and salvation to the soul. As Rūmī puts it:

Since prophethood’s the guide to liberty,

Believers get their liberty from prophets free.^48

In the pursuit of goodness, knowledge and beauty, we receive such a sense of joy
and experience so much rapture and delight that we even forget personal sorrow
and grief; we become, as Sa‛dī says, steeped so deep in the delight of contemplation
that ‘all the world’s woes have no effect’. In Islamic erotic spirituality, this is best
illustrated in the famous Sūrah XII (Joseph) in the Qur’ān, where we read how
Zulaykhā, the wife of the Pharoah of Egypt, summoned a group of her Egyptian
women friends to her palace. She wanted them to see her favourite slave-boy
Joseph, with whom she was madly infatuated, for themselves. As soon as he strutted
in the room, the ladies, who had all previously found fault with Zulaykhā for her
passion for him, immediately recanted their prudery, being smitten by the over-
whelming loveliness of his ‘human form divine’. Wildly besotted with him, they slit
their wrists with the same knives she’d given them to peel fruit, exclaiming: ‘This is
not a human being, but some gracious angel!’ (XII: 31). By preaching a religion of
passionate love (‘ishq), poets such as Ḥāfiẓ or Sa‛dī similarly intend to advocate the
idea that by falling in love and observing the courtesies of lover and beloved, men
and women may realize transports of consciousness unbeknownst to normative
conformist religious piety. In this fashion, we may attain felicity and salvation both
in this world and the next, which is, by the way, precisely the sense intended by
Ḥāfiẓ’s well-known exhortation:

Go strain your every nerve to gain the high degree of love;

The benefits will be immense if only you could make that voyage.^49

Such is also the purport underlying Sa‛dī’s celebrated description of the mystical
‘stages of love’ in these verses at the beginning of hisBūstān:

If you desire to chart your way across

This ground, first hamstring all the horses

You’d use to journey back. Then contemplate

The mirror of your heart until the state

Of purity you slowly find. If the perfume

Of love befuddles you till you’re drunken,

You’ll probe about to seek that timeless vow

You made to God. Your quest’s on foot till now,

But once you’re there, you’ll fly on wings of love,

Till certainty the veil of phantasy

Rends aside and nothing but the Court

Of Majesty remains to veil your heart.^50

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