Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

Don’t give us wine which legal schools have banned

but wine through which Faith’s principles are crowned.^87

Similarly, Ibn Fāriḍ, in a key verse from hisWineOde, celebrates the ‘sin’ of his
drunken bacchanalian adoration of wine as follows:

But they said: ‘You’ve drunk sin!’

No, indeed, I drank only

that whose abstention

is sin to me.^88

TheImmediatePresentMoment(naqd-i waqt)intheReligionofLove

Since love transforms the stuff of the past or future into effects and assets
consumed in the present and ‘now’, the devotee of the religion of love lives in the
present moment. The lover is always the ‘Child of the Moment’ (ibnal-waqt), as Rūmī
put it:

The Sufi is ‘a son of the moment;’

The wordmañanais unheard of on the Way.^89

The Sufi is ‘a son of the moment;’

In quest of purity he holds the moment close

Like a son clings to his father.^90

In hisDiscourses, Rūmī explains the theosophical doctrine underlying this notion as
follows:

Some men look at the beginning, and some men look at the end. These who

look at the end are formidable and powerful, for their gaze is fixed on the final

issue of things and the world beyond.

Then, there are those who look at the beginning, who are more elect. They

say, ‘What need is there for us to look at the end? If wheat is sown at the

beginning, barley cannot be reaped in the end, or if barley is sown, wheat shall

never be harvested.’ So their gaze is set on the beginning.

There are others who still more elect: they gaze neither upon the beginning

nor do they contemplate the end. Being absorbed in God, neither beginning

nor end ever enter their minds.^91

Since thefedelid’amorewho pursue love’s creed understand the preciousness of the
present moment, they know that time must not be wasted in expectation of any
future Resurrection. Anyway, for them the Resurrection shall never come since it

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