Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry

Leonard Lewisohn, Leonard Lewisohn

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857736604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary
• Index: Literature

The romantic lyricism of the great Persian poet Hafiz (1315-1390) continues to be admired around the world. Recent exploration of that lyricism by Iranian scholars has revealed that, in addition to his masterful use of poetic devices, Hafiz's verse is deeply steeped in the philosophy and symbolism of Persian love mysticism. This innovative volume discusses the aesthetic theories and mystical philosophy of the classical Persian love-lyric (ghazal) as particularly exemplified by Hafiz (who, along with Rumi and Sa'di, is Persia's most celebrated poet). For the first time in western literature, Hafiz's rhetoric of romance is situated within the broader context of what scholars refer to as 'Love Theory' in Arabic and Persian poetry in particular and Islamic literature more generally. Contributors from both the West and Iran conduct a major investigation of the love lyrics of Hafiz and of what they signified to that high culture and civilization which was devoted to the School of Love in medieval Persia. The volume will have strong appeal to scholars of the Middle East, medieval Islamic literature, and the history and culture of Iran.

PART I

ḤĀFIẒ IN THE SOCIO-HISTORICAL, LITERARY AND MYSTICAL MILIEU OF MEDIEVAL PERSIA

Prolegomenon to the Study of Ḥāfiẓ
1 – Socio-historical and Literary Contexts: Ḥāfiẓ in Shīrāz

Leonard Lewisohn

Cité de l’amour

When Ḥāfiẓ was born in the city of Shīrāz some time between 710/1310 and 720/1320,¹ the cultural epoch into which our poet stepped was one of the richest in all human history. As the second leading cultural capital (after Tabriz) of medieval Persia, the artistic, intellectual and literary brilliance of fourteenth-century Shīrāz under Muẓaffarid rule is perhaps best comparable to fifteenth-century Florence under Cosimo and Lorenzo de Medici. The poets and philosophers who thrived in this intellectual centre of south-western Fars easily rival the likes of Marsilio Ficino, Botticelli, Michelangelo and Pico de Mirandelo, who were to fill the capital city of Italian Tuscany a century later. For several centuries, throughout all the domains of the Islamic world, Shīrāz had been renowned as House of Knowledge (dār al-‘ilm),² the city vaunting its learned theologians, eloquent preachers, pious ascetics, ecstatic Sufis, erudite scholars, specialist theologians, great calligraphers, famous scientists and adept hommes de lettres. Many of the natives of the city still figure as the central pillars of classical Islamic civilization. Shaykh Rūzbihān Baqlī (d. 606/1210), one of the greatest exponents of paradoxical expression and certainly the most original author of works on Sufi erotic theology, had flourished there a century before Ḥāfiẓ. Sa‘dī of Shīrāz, the greatest romantic and humanist poet in the Persian language, had died in 691/1292, less than a generation before Ḥāfiẓ’s birth, while the Illuminationist (Ishrāqī) philosopher Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī (d. 710/1311), author of the encyclopaediac work Durrat al-tāj li-ghurrat al-Dubāj, had walked its streets a few years before he was born.

This city of ‘Saints and Poets’, as Arthur Arberry called it,³ was especially famous for its colleges and seminaries, its Sufi centres (khānaqāhs) and mosques, many of which had large accompanying gardens and possessed properties attached by charitable bequest to their grounds. The presence of these institutions, even if their administrators were often than not corrupt,⁴ lent the town a peculiar sacred ambience in the popular imagination. In Shīrāz – claimed the fourteenth-century Morrocan world traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who visited the city during Ḥāfiẓ’s life – the Qur’ān is chanted more beautifully than anywhere else in the Muslim world. The city was also like Florence in being both hotly decadent and a hotbed of religious fervour,⁵ with prayer assemblies, Qur’ān study classes, Sufi séances for samā‘, lecture halls full of preachers calling the populace to repent their sins, recluses and ascetics (zuhhād) down every corner and alley,⁶ vignettes of which appear everywhere in Ḥāfiẓ’s verse.

The city also prided itself on vast cemeteries with mausoleums of its saints. ‘In Shīrāz one thousand Sufi masters and saints or more are found’, boasted Sa‘dī in a poem describing the city in the thirteenth century, ‘around whose head the Ka‘ba continuously circumambulates’.⁷ The most interesting work on Shīrāz’s necropolis was a work penned by Junayd-i Shīrāzī in Ḥāfiẓ’s lifetime called The Thousand Mausoleums, a guidebook landmarking all the important tombs as sites of visitation for travellers, adding in as an extra feature a backdrop account of the city’s famous quarters.⁸ This work provided a veritable tourist guide to the sacred sites and shrines of Shīrāz,⁹ and for visitors who flocked there from all over Islamdom gave ‘the impression that the whole of Shīrāz consisted of pious Sunnis’.¹⁰ Among these holy sites, the tomb of the Sufi master Ibn Khafīf of Shīrāz (d. 371/982), renowned for his ascetic prowess, was the most popular spot of weekend visitation for the populace of the city, second only to Shāh Chirāgh, the tomb of Aḥmad ibn Mūsā, brother of the Shi‘ite Imām ‘Alī al-Riḍā, slain in 220/835.¹¹ Ibn Baṭṭūṭa describes how Tāsh Khātun, the mother of Sulṭān Abū Isḥāq Īnjū (reg. 743/1343–753/1353: the ruler of Shīrāz when Ḥāfiẓ was a youth), paid homage to ‘the Imām, the Pole, the Saint, Abū ‘Abdu’llāh Ibn Khafīf, known to them as the Shaikh, ensampler of the whole land of Fars...