Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

Italian gangsters who control large neighbourhoods of New York City, Chicago or
Milan today. Although therindāntheoretically occupied the lowest rung in the
social hierarchy, they were extremely powerful and feared for their ruthlessness,
for most of the city’s hired assassins, professional thugs and thieves belonged to
their company. The princes who ruled the city were essentially in thrall to these
gangs of thugs, for Ḥāfiẓ’s Shīrāz, though famed abroad for its pious mystics and
men of learning, was also a ‘city of hoodlums’ (shahr-irindān).^269 As John Limbert
explains: ‘Few cities combined so much hedonism and so much spiritualism as
Shīrāz. As far as the government was concerned, the dissipations of therendanwere
preferable to the fasts of thezahedanor ascetics. For while the latter worked at the
simplest jobs and paid few taxes, the former were steady customers of thekharabat
(vice-dens) – the brothels (beit al-lotf), wine-shops (sharabkhaneh), opium-dens
(bangkhaneh), and gambling houses (qomarkhaneh)–all of which paidtamghato the
treasury.’^270 The hoodlums were known for sensational adventurism (mājarā-jū’ī),
contempt for conventional religious morality, along with a devil-may-care attitude
(lā-ubālīgarī), and their deliberate courting of infamy and notoriety. In his chapter
on the ‘Ethics of Dervishes’ in theRose Garden(Gulistān), Sa‛dī provides a good
vignette of their typical conduct in Shīrāz a century earlier:

A gang of hoodlums [ṭāyifa-irindān] came across a dervish and spoke abusively

to him, calling him bad names, striking him with blows, causing him sore

offence and grievous bodily harm. He went to the Master of the Path (pīr-i

ṭarīqat) to complain of their conduct. The latter replied, ‘My son, this dervish

mantle of yours is the garb of Contentment. Whoever wears the mantle yet

cannot bear to have his desires thwarted is an impostor. Such are forbidden to

wear dervish robes.’^271

In only oneghazaldoes Ḥāfiẓ mention these lowlife hoodlums in the bars and broth-

els of Shīrāz, therind-ibazārī, marketplace rakes^272 of the city’s underbelly which fill

the pages of other contemporary poets such as ‘Ubayd Zākānī. The figure of therind

celebrated in his lyrics is not like these coarse and dissolute characters at all, but

rather a nonconformist type of refined aesthetic and spiritual values.^273 In Ḥāfiẓ’s

inspired libertine appears a sophisticated aesthetic discernment and spiritual

urbanity missing from the raffish hooligans who frequented Shīrāz’s dens of vice. In

this context, as Shayegan underlines, the wordrindevokes:

a lively lucidity, asavoirfaire, a refinement of action, a tact that goes all the

way to compliance, a discretion in speech, which are neither craft nor

hypocrisy, nor an affectation of mystery; but can, outside their context,

become those very things, being reduced to insidous shifts, not to say dissem-

bling and imposture. Again, the term denotes an interior liberty, an authentic

detachment from the things of this world, suggesting the deliverance, in

however small a measure, of the man who, shaking off his tawdry finery, lays

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