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love, subjected him to several trials – demanding that he renounce Islam, burn the
Qur’ān, drink wine and work for her as a swineherd. He acquiesced to all his
beloved’s commands, eventually becoming the model pious heretic of the Sufi reli-
gion of love. All of Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry, as I have shown elsewhere, is saturated by this
tale.^72 In the following lines from ‘Aṭṭār’s account, we hear the Shaykh’s disciples
urging him to recant and repent of his blasphemous passion. But to all their
entreaties, he makes only flippantly sacrilegious replies:
‘My sheikh,’ urged one, ‘forget this evil sight;
Rise, cleanse yourself according to our rite.’
‘In blood^73 I cleanse myself,’ the sheikh replied;
‘In blood, a hundred times, my life is dyed.’
... Another cried: ‘Enough of this; you must
Seek solitude and in repentant dust
Bow down to God.’ ‘I will,’ replied the sheikh,
‘Bow down in dust, but for my idol’s sake.’
And one reproached him: ‘Have you no regret
For Islam and those rites you would forget?’
He said: ‘No man repents past folly more;
Why is it I was not in love before?’^74Eventually, the love-spell cast by the girl was broken and the prayers of his distressed
disciples, for months at their wits’ end on how to win the shaykh back into the fold of
Islam, were heard. The swineherd Sufi shaykh awoke from the dream of Christianity.
However, soon after he cut off his Christian cincture and headed back with them to
Mecca, she pursued him hotly, tragically dying – a Muslim, of course – in his arms.^75
Ultimately, the shaykh did ‘repent’ of his love passion, but his repentance was not
so much a formal ‘turning back’ as a passage out of exoteric into esoteric Islam – a
casting-off of the phantasy of conventional faith for the reality of true devotion.
Shaykh Ṣan’ān, having passed through the crucible of erotic romantic passion,
experienced a fresh conversion to religion based upon the principles of love. He was
no longer the desiccated ascetic Sufi of ere, but a fieryFedelid’amore.
TheWorshipofWineintheReligionofLove
Classical Persian poems are normally filled with extravagant praise for the cup-
bearer (sāqī), goblet (sāghar), wine-vat (khum) and drunkenness (mastī), winehouse
(maykhāna), tavern (kharābāt), tavern-master (pīr-i kharābāt), and so on. Indeed,
many of the clichés and stock metaphors in Persian erotic poetry are bacchana-
lian,^76 with the lover (‘āshiq) usually described as a witless wanderer (parīshān), a
headless and footless vagabond (bī-sarupā), a drunkard (mast), who is constantly
intoxicated (mast-i mudām), transported in selfless rapture (bīkhvīshī), ‘out of his
ḤāfiẓandtheReligionofLoveinClassicalPersianPoetry