contemplation (shāhid-bāzī), it became virtually impossible to distinguish between
the metaphysics of the spirit and the erotics of the flesh. The art historian A.
Papadopoulo refers to this perspective as expressing an ‘aesthetic of ambiguity’,^345 a
viewpoint suggesting, as John Renard points out, that ‘the work does not coerce the
viewer into attaching any one spiritual meaning to the form ... the viewer cannot
always say for certain which painters, for example, intended their scenes of lovers
in a paradisal garden to be taken as visions of heavenly reality, and which wanted
the viewer to see merely an earthly picnic’.^346 Ghazālī’s explicitly erotic vocabulary- couched in symbolic allusions (ishārāt) to describe the ambigious experience of
love, whether sexual or sacral – was developed and enriched by his later Sufi
followers, particularly Rūzbihān Baqlī of Shīrāz (d. 606/1210), whose views on
‘beauty-worship’ (jamāl-parastī)^347 were a key influence on Sa‛dī’s theoerotic
verse.^348 Ḥāfiẓ was certainly familiar with Rūzbihān’s views, and may have even
been attached to his Sufi order.^349
The most famous Persian Sufi teacher who made the erotic theology ofshāhid-bāzī
the foundation of his doctrine was Awḥad al-Dīn Kirmānī (d. 635/1238). In Kirmānī’s
Sufi tradition of erotic spirituality, a tradition to which Ḥāfiẓ’sDīvāndirectly
belongs, human love forms a bridge across which every seeker necessarily must fare
to reach the farther – divine – shore. This idea was encapsulated in an Arabic
maxim: ‘The phenomenal form is a bridge to the supra-formal Reality [al-majāz
qanṭaratal-ḥaqīqat].’^350 Kirmānī’s verses gives a good summary of the basic doctrine
ofshāhid-bāzī:
Our soul’s an infant on the Way;
The Witness is its nurse. To sport
And play with the Witness always is
What gives the soul its sustenance.
These fair forms that you contemplate
Are not themselves that lovely Witness:
They are just shadows cast from it.^351The practice of mystic-lovers such as ‘Irāqī and Kirmānī, explains Jāmī apologeti-
cally in his biography of the latter, ‘was that they always engaged in the scrutiny of
the phenomenal forms of sensory beauty and by medium of those forms they con-
templated the beauty of God Almighty’.^352 The contemplative discipline ofshāhid-
bāzī, as these verses and Jāmī’s remarks about their author demonstrate, constitutes
the main practice of therind’s romantic religion, a practice of course completely at
odds with conventional Muslim ethics confined within the boundaries of a priggish
moral code based on the artificial and ultimately – the ontologically unreal –
sacred/profane dichotomy.^353 The moral probity of the practice was left to depend
entirely on the beholder’s subjectiveviewpoint.^354 If he practised the discipline prop-
erly, the seershāhid-bāzwould be graced with a vision of the Sublime and divine
through contemplation of fair faces (rū-yikhubān) which, though ostensibly ungodly
ḤāfiẓintheSocio-historical,LiteraryandMysticalMilieuofMedievalPersia 47