Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

During the ‘born-again’ king Mubāriz al-Dīn’s reign of terror ... the struggle

against this merciless hypocrite – who had been nicknamed the ‘policeman’

[muḥtasib] by the rogues of the city, being notorious for his excessively cruel

and ruthless nature – was not the job of the ordinary thugs and rogues of the

marketplace [rindān-i bazārī]. They were on the payroll of other strongmen

and henchmen, since they attached themselves to whoever held power, and

willy-nilly carried out the orders of the ‘policeman’. No, the battle with this

Mafioso ‘policeman’ prince was a job better left to those ‘inspired libertines

who were willing to hazard everything and risk wagering all away’ [rindān-i

pākbāz]. These men were the ‘schoolman libertines’, or ‘rogues of the college’

[rindān-imadrasa], who had insight into the reality of religion [ḥaqīqat-idīn]

and morality beyond such pretensions and falsehoods. It was they who real-

ized that this sort of sanctimony and hypocritical display of piety was in fact

the greatest threat to honest religion and morality.^279

Hazardous as it was to express anti-prohibitionist sentiments in the Islamic
Republic of Mubāriz’s Shīrāz, these ‘schoolmen libertines’ struggled as best they
could in the oppressive political climate. In the following verse in which he satiri-
cally refers to Mubāriz al-Dīn as ‘the policeman’,^280 Ḥāfiẓ even manages to draw a
moral from his hypocritical religious behaviour, giving some mordant advice which
will evoke sympathy in anyone who has ever lived under the strictures of a religious
theocracy:

Take your cue from the policeman and learn of him, oh heart

The way of the libertines’ inspired faith, for he is drunk

Yet none of him suspects this true.^281

If Ḥāfiẓ’srindwere but an ordinary street thug and his notion of the inspired liber-
tine’s faith the literary equivalent of contemporary gangsta-rap, a lowlife hero so
obvious and so material would be as blindly evident and boldly inarticulate as the
Hollywood cowboy who preaches down the barrel of his smoking gun. Ḥāfiẓ, then,
in elaborating the ethics and erotics of the inspired libertine, in declaring:

I followed the path of the mad libertines for years –

Long enough, until I was able with the consent

Of intelligence to put my greediness into prison.^282

or:

Unbound romance and love and youth comprise

The sum of our desires, for when the innersens

Of such ideas converge, the shuttlecock

Of speech may then be struck.^283

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