Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

ProlegomenontotheStudyof √Æfiæ

2–TheMysticalMilieu: √Æfiæ’s

EroticSpirituality

ḤāfiẓandtheInspiredLibertine(rind)

The philosophical significance and erotico-mystical connotations of the subversive
piety of the ‘inspired libertine’, orrind, has preoccupied readers of Ḥāfiẓ’s poetry for
generations. The main reason for our fascination is that the whole notion of
inspired libertinism (rindī) presents a major moral problem: as an ethical category
disengaged from conventional piety (taqwā) and asceticism (zuhd), it leaves Ḥāfiẓ
open to the accusation of simply being an advocate of hedonism and sybaritic
debauchery. The virtually indefinable^260 and paradoxical ethic of the inspired liber-
tine was summarized by the Iranian philosopher Dayyush Shayegan as follows:

In this concept we find a sense of immoderacy, a behaviour out of the ordi-

nary, shocking, scandalous, able to disorient the most composed spirits, a non-

conformity which derives not so much from ostentation as from the explosive

exhuberance of a vision so rich, so full, that it cannot manifest itself without

doing violence to everyday banality and without breaking the limits defined

by the normality of things. This term expresses, further, a predilection for the

uncertain, for language that is veiled and masked, for hints and insinuations,

which in the authenticrendare expressed in inspired paradoxes [shaṭḥiyāt] ...

Finally, there is in this concept a boundless love of the divine such as we see

in the great thinkers and mystics of Iranian spirituality; but detached from its

mystical content, it is transformed into fanaticism and, steered byhominess

magni, to the psychology of the mob.^261

Although reconciling the differences between the unitive, ascetic and ecstatic ten-
dencies of mystical traditions and the more mundane concerns of society has
always been a fundamental problem in the history of religions, and is not particular
to Islamic thought,^262 a number of other scholars – lacking any real nuanced insight
into the psychology of religion, and unable to perceive any shades in the spectrum
of religion and ethics beyond the conventional blackness of sin and whiteness of
virtue – have in fact interpreted Ḥāfiẓ’s doctrine ofrindīliterally as implying an
advocacy of debauchery pure and simple.^263 Other students of the poet have
equated Ḥāfiẓ’s notion of therindwith a kind of Camusian immoralist existentialist