Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

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has already occurred! That is why Ḥāfiẓ rebukes the ascetic for the emptiness of his
promise of a future paradise:

When Paradise is mine today as cash in hand,

Why then should I be taken in and count upon

The puritan’s pledge of tomorrow’s kingdom?^92

Sa‛dī enunciates this same doctrine in one verse:

Eternal youth with its great fortune and felicity

Belongs to he who’s next to you; he’s never had his day;

He knows no age: his home’s in highest heaven.^93

Living in the here and now, the lover finds heaven and earth transfigured: he
becomes a denizen of heaven. ‘The Resurrection becomes your veryétatd’âmein the
immediate present of Now [naqd-i ḥāl]’,^94 as Rūmī puts it. Not only is the
Resurrection an immediate experience (naqd-iḥāl) for him, but all the great events
of history – the myths, legends, and the tales of the heroes and saints of yore – are
felt as living experiences apprehended in the present. They are not hoary tales of a
bygone past. They represent the ready cash and coinage of the lover’s soul, whose
shillings and pence he spends here and now. For poets such as Sa‛dī and Ḥāfiẓ, the
references to the legends of Moses and his revelation on Mt Sana’i (Qur’ān, VII:
142–5), or the tales of Abraham and the tyrant Nimrud who cast him into the fur-
nace,^95 are not simply colourful poetic devices – which the Arabic rhetoricians
pedantically categorize as being a ‘proverbial allusion’ (talmīḥ)^96 – but actual occur-
rences within the poet’s soul. This interiorization of religious mythology within the
psyche of the poet is reflected in Ḥāfiẓ’s verse about Moses’ vision of God in the
Burning Bush:

Here’s pitch black night, there lies the Valley of Peace

Before my feet, so where’s Moses’ light,

Mt. Sanai’s Burning Bush and the promised sight?^97

In reference to the story of Abraham being cast into the furnace, likewise Sa‛dī says:

Although I’m cast like Abraham into the furnace of

Affliction, it would not matter: glowing with your love

I’d bask among the basil shoots and tulips in your garden.^98

All the tales of great lovers and the fables of the heroic champions of yore thus
become part of the soul’s psychohistory. They pertain the inner journey of the poet.
That is why the epic tales of Firdawsī, the versified romances of Niẓāmī, and ‘Aṭṭār’s
story of Shaykh Ṣan‘ān’s infatuation with the Christian girl comprise the stuff of

ḤāfiẓandtheReligionofLoveinClassicalPersianPoetry