Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

My heart – disport

Your head: loveplay’s

Not jesting business.

Nobody has yet struck

Eros’s shuttlecock

With Desire’s bat.^62

Here Ḥāfiẓ contrasts the transcendental nature of ‘true love’ (‘ishq) to the pursuit of
idle erotic amusement, which in comparison seems but a kind of shallow ‘sport’
(bāzī) and selfish ‘desire’ (havas): this term here having no transcendent mystical
implication. In this respect, Ḥāfiẓ often clarifies that the flames of his erotic longing
and fire of his desire (ātash-ihavas) were not inspired by any temporal passion, but
that his passion was enkindled in pre-Eternity when the uncreated souls of men
first professed divine love for their Lord:

Flushed and scorched in desire’s sultry flames today

Ḥāfiẓ’s heart not only now aches with woe,

A brand of grief sears him likes the anemone

For now, for always – and since pre-eternity.^63

This type of holy antinomianism and pious libertinism is best described in aghazal
by Rūmī devoted to the ‘lovers’ and the ‘gnostics’, which describes them as a
debauched company of profligates and libertines. In this poem he employs all the
important technical terms used in Islamic theology to refer to antinomian
debauchees – in particular, themubāḥī, a wild libertine who is utterly outside the
pale of all Islamic faith and piety, and theibāḥatī, the pursuer of libertine ways.
For those who believe that Sufism constitutes a basically heterodox anti-Islamic
mystical ideology falsely masquerading under Muslim robes, Rūmī’s poem brings
unwelcome news, for he immediately subverts his own subversive rhetoric, clarify-
ing that there is a higher mystical significance beneath his profane terms:

Today we’ve got songs and an amphora

full of wine and the music ofSamā‘;

A Saki stone-drunk bears us the wine

among this crowd of wayward libertines.

They’re ‘far-out’ libertines, in fact, they’ve passed

beyond existence – not decadent, demented

Dope-fiend types, high on hemp or hash:

the blacked-out addicts of the lowlife.^64

In the first line of thisghazal, the ‘Saki stone-drunk’ (Sāqī-yibad-mast) is a symbol
for Rūmī’s spiritual master Shams-i Tabrīzī. He also clarifies that this ‘crowd of
wayward libertines’ (jam‘-imubāḥī) are lovers – that is, spiritually advanced mystics

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