Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

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and mundane, could be viewed as being a ‘divine creation’ (sun‘-ikhudā-y).^355 The
human form beheld in selfless ecstasy becomes a ‘theophanic witness’ (gender is
always ambiguous in Persian, but in Ḥāfiẓ’s verse the Witness is nearly always
female^356 ). The inspired libertine’s selfless gaze^357 on heavenly beauty in the mirror
of earthly phenomenal forms invariably invites the condemnation of the prim,
prudish guardians of the Muslim moral law. In the following verse, Ḥāfiẓ addresses
the angry Sufi shaykh who reproached him for pursuit of romantic love, giving this
formalist foe of his a robust riposte:

I am not about to abandon love, nor the secret Witness,

Nor the cup of wine. I have sworn off these things

A hundred times, and I won’t do it again.^358

Unlike Christian theological doctrine, which distinguishes strictly between divine
agapeand humaneros, holding the second to be a debased form of the first and
only indulged at the expense of the former, in Ḥāfiẓ’s metaphysics of love there is
little or no differentiation between earthly human and heavenly divine love. In
Ḥāfiẓ’s erotic imagery, as Eric Schroeder observed, ‘there is a changing relationship
and a constant connection between the erotic and the metaphysical ... his erotic is
not sentimental but charged with physical reality and an incipient metaphysical
penetration which allows of a strange and wide-flung rhetoric in which the
bodily and the cosmic lie together entangled’.^359 Indeed, as Ḥāfiẓ provocatively
challenges: ‘What will anyone who has not nibbled on the apple within the chin of
the beautiful Witness understand of the fruits of Paradise?’36o– romantic love
forms a wonderful bridge to DivineEros. The ambiguity of such erotic imagery
could be fully exploited by the use ofdouble entendreor amphibology (īhām) by
Religion-of-Love poets – a poetic device of special significance in Ḥāfiẓ’s
poetics.^361 Erotic contemplation thus became a kind of religious injunction among
the poets of this school such as Awḥad al-Dīn Kirmānī, Sa‛dī,^362 Khwājū, Kamāl
Khujandī, and particularly Ḥāfiẓ, who enjoined it with pontifical tones throughout
hisDīvān:

Don’t kiss anything except the sweetheart’s lip

And the cup of wine, Ḥāfiẓ; friends, it’s a grave mistake

To kiss the hand held out to you by a puritan.^363

According to the tenets of Ḥāfiẓ’s erotic spirituality (I cite here Lāhūrī’s marvellous

exegesis of this verse):

the adept should not seek the grace of anyone but the human figurative

beloved [ma‘shūq-imajāzī] and human love [maḥabbat-imajāzī] since she is a

vehicle by means of which one attains union to the True Beloved [ma‘shūq-i

ḥaqīqī] and True Love [maḥabbat-iḥaqīqī]; by the intermediary means of the

ḤāfiẓandtheReligionofLoveinClassicalPersianPoetry