Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

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himself open without sham, and naked to the mirror of the world; however,

degenerated from its primitive context, this attitude can turn into one of

exhibitionism, of posing and of mere libertinage.^274

It is true that the wordrindrecalled to the majority of the poet’s contemporary
readers (and still does today) the spirit of the chivalrous ruffian; indeed, the reck-
less mystique and colourful character of these mobsters and desperados had
influenced the development of the poetic and mystical image of therindin medieval
Sufi poetry.^275 That such connotations are an integral part of Ḥāfiẓ’s poems cannot
be argued away, but to posit a literal one-to-one equivalency between the two
is absurd.^276 Arguments to this effect in a sophisticated form exhibit the debilitating
effects of insisting that anything that is true must be exclusively true and that
the presence of one implication necessarily diminishes the force of counter-
implications that are also present.
What is clear is that the very ambivalence of the term enabled Ḥāfiẓ’s inspired
libertine to acquire a kind ofsuccèsdescandalethrough being coloured with associa-
tion with the shady character of the infamous hoodlums of Shīrāz. Transforming
their badge of infamy and dishonour and shame into acclaim and fame, the inspired
libertine thus cut a dash through his poems as a kind of revolutionary religious
intellectual in society, an iconoclastic rebel who adhered to the religion ofErosas a
counter-faith to the prevailing hardline fundamentalist version of orthodoxy and
the moribund Islamic puritanism of his day. In the conventional religiously oriented
society of fourteenth-century Persia, the libertine of course had largely a negative
social value. In the realm of spiritual truth, however – in respect to which many of
the seminary-trained clerics, ascetics and Sufis of the period were in practice quite
often impostors and fraudsters pretending piety – the rebellious social image of the
libertine rake in all his dissolute and impious notoriety quite appropriately comple-
mented, and in fact expressed in mirror image, therealnatureof the ascetic Sufi or
formalist Muslim cleric.^277 In one verse he even moans to his mistress that the
‘inspired libertines’ of her kingdom are in fact the true saints, but, alas, the
cognoscenti of the spirit who might recognize these ‘Friends of God’ (valī-shināsān)
have long ago departed:

For the pious rakes’ thirsting lips nobody

Anymore can spare a cup, and those who could

Purview the saints seem all to have fled this land.^278

As pointed out above, many of Ḥāfiẓ’s most bitterly anti-clericalghazals were com-

posed under the fundamentalist dictatorship of Mubāriz al-Dīn (reg. 754/1353–759/

1357) immediately following Abū Isḥāq Īnjū’s tolerant reign (743/1342–754/1353).

Comparing this king’s ‘religious Inquisition’ with those that afflicted Europe a few

centuries later, ‘Abd al-Ḥusayn Zarrīnkūb highlights the dangerous political climate

in which suchghazals were composed:

ḤāfiẓandtheReligionofLoveinClassicalPersianPoetry