Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

figurative human beloved and human love one may unite oneself with the

True Beloved and experience True Love – for (as the Arabic adage goes) ‘the

figurative is a bridge to the Real’ ... It is a grave error to kiss the hand of and

pledge oneself to those who sell their ascetic abstinence for the sake of riches,

worldly rank and status.^364

In this fashion, themalāmatīlover’s adherence to the creed of romantic love and

practice of the art of erotic contemplation served as an antidote to the blame and

hatred that he invariably incurred from Muslim pharisees.

TheEroticGaze:ContemplationofHumanBeautysub specie aeternitatis

(naẓar-bāzī)

A complementary aspect of the erotic contemplation of the inspired libertine in
Ḥāfiẓ’s verse is the poetic genre of the theoerotics of the eye, in which the poet
casts a playful regard on beauty (naẓar-bāz) and beholds the divine in the mirror of
human beauty insofar as the latter bears ‘witness’ (shāhid) to the former. Ḥāfiẓ
refers to this key-concept in various constructions^365 altogether ten times in the
Dīvān.In the three out of four instances the termnaẓar-bāzis associated with the
word ‘inspired libertine’ (rind) and/or the word ‘lover’ (‘āshiq),^366 and in all five
instances where he refers to his infatuation with ‘the sport of the visual regard’ and
boasts of playing the ‘game of glances’ (naẓar-bāzī), he characterizes the practice as
being one of the lover’s foremost accomplishments.^367 In one of these instances,
when speaking about the ambiguous metaphysical gaze that contemplates physical
human beauty, Ḥāfiẓ boasts:

I am a lover and a libertine, a player of

The game of glances with eyes that gaze in love.

Such myriad arts and skills are my ornament:

I say it plain – in fact, I show it off.^368

His contemplative regard for human beauty (naẓar-bāzī) is ‘an art of particular sig-
nificance to Ḥāfiẓ, a key term in the poetry of which he boasts in many verses’,^369 as
Khurramshāhī informs us. Translated here as ‘game of glances with eyes that gaze in
love’,naẓar-bāzīmeans literally ‘playing with one’s glance’, ‘to cast a flirtatious
glance upon’ or ‘to capriciously regard mortal beauty’. It is the gaze of the mystic
who engages in the ‘Witness Game’ (shāhid-bāzī).Ḥāfiẓian aesthetics dictates the
sacrality of human love and beauty, for as Lāhūrī in his commentary pronounces: ‘It
is only through the forms of mortal beauty [suwar-ihusniyya] that God-as-Absolute
in reality can attract the hearts of lovers to Himself.’^370 Explaining the contempla-
tive technique of his erotic gaze, Lāhūrī comments that ‘the gnostic of Shīrāz [Ḥāfiẓ]
spent most of his time absorbed in contemplation of the True Beauty [jamāl-iḤaqīqī]’,

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