Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

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aswellasthe higher figurative senses pertaining to those transcendental symbolic
meanings.
If we approach the transcendental significance of some of these symbols, how the
process leading to the sublimation of these metaphors occurred – and thus therai-
sond’ȇtresustaining them – is easy to discern. The phrase ‘it is delightful to be mad’,
for example, poetically speaking conveys a self-evident sense. Understood spiritu-
ally, however, the phrase makes no sense whatsoever unless we understand it to
imply a madnessaboveandbeyondreason, rather thanbelowreason: the lower, irra-
tional – psychotic – insanity.^58 Likewise, the expression ‘the joys of intoxication’
makes perfect sense to every secular sensibility attuned to wine’s bacchanalian
pleasures. But to the philosophical temperament focused on progress in the spiri-
tual life, it makes sense only when it refers to the drunkenness that contemplation
of the Beautiful inspires – or, as the Sufis say, the ecstatic rapture that the sight of
the beauteous visage of the Cup-bearer (sāqī) arouses in the beholder – stimulating
intoxication without any hangover. In the same vein, the joys of freedom extolled
by the Sufi poets involve their liberation from the vices of greed, anger, pride and
emancipation from the vanity of ambition for honours and high rank. Liberty is as
much a spiritual virtue as licence is a moral vice. That wanton witness-of-beauty
(shāhid-iharjā’ī) celebrated in Sufi mystical poetry is that icon of supreme loveliness,
whose ravishingly attractive countenance is everywhere reflected, both in man and
nature alike.^59 When Sufi mystics proudly announce that they ‘revel in the delights
of desire [havas]’, their apparently sybarite sentiment takes as its transcendental
reference point the ‘grand desire’ of the adept to realize freedom from selfhood, as
Rūmī states:

There lies in no man’s head

Such desire as lies in mine;

The desire I sense is such that

I’m bereft of all ken of self.^60

Similarly, Sanā’ī boasts of his own ‘desire’ (havas) animating his poetic
inspiration:

The magic diablerie of conjurers

from Indian lands, graces

his breath of inspiration;

The subtle Chinese portraitists

whose art all faces unmasks

lend his desires animation.^61

In Ḥāfiẓ’s verse as well, we find that the fulfilment of desire in love implies a free-
dom from self-interest and the renunciation of selfish desire:

ḤāfiẓandtheReligionofLoveinClassicalPersianPoetry