In another verse, Ḥāfiẓ again celebrates the legend of theqalandar, referring indi-
rectly to Shaykh Ṣan‘ān, who found faith and piety in binding on Christian cincture
at the bidding of the Christian girl:
What rapturous, enchanting moments
that holy roaming dervish has
who fares through all the stations of
the mystic way, who in the tangled knots
of the Christian girdle that he wears
still tills his rosary and hymns
angelic litanies and prayers.^56In these verses, Persia’s two most famous love lyricists, Sa‛dī and Ḥāfiẓ, boldly
announce their avocation ofEros’ creed. Making full use of the antinomian vocabu-
lary available in Persian, they declare themselvesFedelid’amore, indifferent to the
blame and reproach of those cold souls who are disbarred from the throes of erotic
passion and thus banned from entry into the precincts ofAmor. As faithful servants
of Love’s Path, they understood that ‘nothing exists save grace and comeliness’^57
in the pursuit of love, and readily declared themselves ready to succumb to all its
passions and temptations.
Although terms such aslā-ubālī,qalandar,rind,qallāsh,mubāḥīanddīvānaorigi-
nally had exclusively profane meanings – referring to various types of thugs, hooli-
gans, debauchees, lunatics, profligates, rakes and other ne’er-do-wells of society –
they were soon taken over by the Sufis and integrated into the Persian Sufi poetic
lexicon, where they were given positive connotations denoting higher degrees of
mystical realization. Thus, the profligate became identified with a mystic of high
degree, the debauchee with a pious man of prayer, the vagabond equated with a dis-
engaged spirit liberated from sensual desires, the knave a member of the saintliest
company, and the lunatic the truly Inspired Man attuned to the Voice of God. Of
course, it is easy to see why today many literary critics in secular circles, who are
more often than not utterly alienated from the traditional symbolic cosmos in
which such emblems, symbols, tropes and types all functioned as part of a
common ‘hermetic’ discourse familiar to all connoisseurs of verse, find themselves
voicing doubts and disagreements about which sense precisely – profane or sacred,
human or divine – such metaphors should convey. Unfortunately, most of the
younger generation of Persian-speaking literati, being immersed in secular Western
values, no longer recall the higher symbolic connotations of these terms. To their
understanding, Ḥāfiẓ thus remains the supreme decadent and hedonist poet,
leader of the world’s grand debauchees. To complicate matters further, the poetic
device ofīhām(amphibology) allowed the Sufi poets to marry heaven and earth,
and, so to speak, condone poetic ambivalence, so that the distinctive allegorical
metonymy of terms in the Sufi symbolic lexicon lent a diversification to their usages,
allowing them to broadly connote both the colourful, literal ‘profane’ connotations
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