36- certainly did not mean to glorify the dissolute lowlife of theKaffeehausliterat
or wax magniloquent over the nightlife pub-crawling through the bordellos and
brothels of medieval Shīrāz, after the fashion of – say – Francois Villon’s ballads or
Arthur Rimbaud’s (1854–91) revolt against Christianity in the name of a ‘higher
licentiousness’ inUne Saison en enfer.^284 Ḥāfiẓ’srindis neither tricky politician,
shameless opportunist, confidence man nor political crook. Such worldly con-men
are in fact ‘uninspired libertines’, who lack the sacred dimension which is the soul
of therind; their fibbing and fabulation but expose the depths of their merely mun-
dane deceit. The inspired libertine on the other hand reveals the world’s deceit:
‘wise-to-the-bait’ of its charms, his actions serve to subvert and unmask the preten-
sions of the entire materialist mentality in both its religious and secular forms.^285
The literary sources of Ḥāfiẓ’s doctrine of the inspired libertine can be traced
back to the sophisticated literary tradition of poetry written in praise of the rite of
the spiritual vagabonds (qalandariyya) and the esoteric teachings of Islamic erotic
spirituality grounded inmalāmatīethics, which will be explored below.
Ḥāfiẓ’sMalāmatīEthicandtheRiteofSpiritualVagabonds
(Qalandariyya)Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism,
A heresy and schism,
Foisted into the canon-law of love;–
No, – wine is only sweet to happy men.- Keats^286
The venerable Persian literary dictionary Burhān al-Qāṭī‘(Decisive Argument)
defines therindān(sing.rind) as folk who are ‘crafty, deceitful, clever, fearless,
reprobate, desperados with a devil-may-care attitude about them [lā-ubālī]. They are
calledrindānbecause they repudiate all norms of society and reject the restraints of
religious piety.’ Following this literal definition, the dictionary then adds that ‘they
are people who outwardly behave in a blameworthy manner and although they
incur blame [malāmat], inwardly they are of sound character [salāmat]’.^287 This latter
connotation draws on the classic epigrammatic definition of themalāmatīway, that
‘perseverance in endurance of blame is renunciation of security and safety [al-
malāmattarkal-salāmat]’.^288
Not only does the termrindthus by definition belong to themalāmatīlexicon, it
was also an important word deriving from the Sufi literary genre known as
‘Wildman poetry’(qalandariyya).^289 All Sufi poets and writers used the symbol of the
qalandarto signify someone freed from the rites of hypocritical devotion in religion,
liberated from the bonds and sanctions of socio-cultural convention,^290 and it is
with this connotation that this figure appears as a popular poetic topos in the lyrics
of Sanā’ī, ‘Aṭṭār and Rūmī, in the hagiography and poetry of ‘Irāqī, as well as in the
ḤāfiẓandtheReligionofLoveinClassicalPersianPoetry