THE LIVING WORLD OF HAFIZ

PROF. USLOOB A. ANSARI

Hafiz’s claims to greatness based on his lyrical exquisiteness and intensity are indisputable: he stands undoubtedly at the apex of Persian lyrical poetry for a variety of reasons. In spite of expressing his genius in a form that had been hallowed or, perhaps, become state by the practice of acknowledged masters over the ages he is yet able to say something which strikes a responsive chord in the average reader’s heart and has also an esoteric aspect to it, and this is paradoxical, indeed. The common man finds, a sympathetic interlocutor in him and the mystically-inclined regards him as ‘the interpreter of mysteries’. What is most distinctive of Hafiz is not his luminous diction alone or the multiple levels of meaning he offers, but his total integrity. Emphasis has too frequently been laid and wrongly, I should think, on the hedonistic element in his poetry as if he were really asking us to abandon all serious concerns of life before the allurement of the senses and the bouts of drinking and revelry. The bacchanalian quality of it, in other words, has been unduly stressed and insisted on unjustifiably. This has been countered by the claim that the glorification of the senses is only a camouflage for making us look to a higher order of reality: it is only a ladder for reaching up the heights of Divine’ Beauty and Love. A preoccupation with mere epicureanism cannot guarantee the kind of greatness that Hafiz indubitably possesses and there are clear indications in his poetry that he wishes, every now and then, to outgrow the merely erotic experience which might have been his starting-point, something that initiated him into and irradiated his vivid and expansive world. He is capable, simultaneously, of playing variations on the conventional themes of love for poetry and looking through the sensuous experience to realities that lie behind and beyond it. His ambivalence is, therefore, traceable to the erotio-mystic character of his poetry.

It would be futile to deny that Hafiz’s poetry of the ghazal offers fine discriminations on the theme of love and in a tone of voice which is intimate, vibrant and exalting and hardly ever melancholy and depressing. The dialectic of love as conceived and presented by him seems to rest on a tripartite basis : the dispenser of the treasure of love, the fact of love itself and the heart that is ravaged and vulnerable. To confine oneself to the finesse with which the fact of love has been visualized and communicated one may keep spotlit in mind the following instances:

This poetry reflects a sort of exuberance and ecstasy that is not met with in other poets and to the same degree. This is brought out in three whole ghaals, sharing a unity of impression all along, and whose opening couplets are as follows:

But it is worth noticing that this exuberance is not just frothy and ephemeral but is the product of experience that has been assimilated and become mellow and poised. Symbols like ;,b,d.4dG,.L..”,j.).’Jthough conventionalized to satiety, have been invested ‘by Hafiz with a new and creative potential. To focus attention on just three of these : or tavern is the symbol of conviviality, of the bracing atmosphere of out-of-doors life and of togetherness, it is a place which is barred against inhibition-mongers, and گل، بلبل، صبا، ساقی، می خانہ are symbolic of accusers, inquisitors, traffickers in religion and those who are possessed of a selfhood vision and are promoters of a reductionist ethics. And ,v) or J4) is a word of polyvalent connotations :,Z) is not only the non-conformist, reviler of the established cannons, an idol-breaker but also one who is capable of exercising a certain degree of lively lucidity and brings into play a self-conscious disengagement with the superficies of life. His behaviour is sometimes undoubtedly shocking and scandalous and this is the means of disorienting the most composed and solidly self-complacent spirits. He also scoffs at the expense of those who pride themselves on their narrowly-conceived idealisms and their habit of exclusivizing of things. His inspired libentirism is aimed at the rejection of all those social taboos that are restrictive and life-denying and he recommends by his own precept and example a kind of abandonment and suppleness that the convention-bound members of society are timid to approve. He is also starkly opposed to all forms of hypocrisy and cannot put up with any facade of religiosity and priggishness. With it, perhaps, also goes freedom from dogma, sectarianism and those hide-bound prejudices which prevent us from encountering Reality courageously. And he is one who is intoxicated with the passion to catch a glimpse of the Divine and to him falsity in behaviour is a cardinal-isin.

Apart from the ecstatic tone and the outward-looking atmosphere of the ghazals, Hafiz is also a master craftsman, capable of matching image with rhythm, handling pairs of opposites and tonalities of modulation with deftness, making striking concision of paradoxes, displaying an iridescence of colours and in a way exploiting all the subtleties and virtuosities of the Persian language to the farthest extent. His power of organization is brought out in the chiselled clarity of phrase, a marmoreal smoothness and a sense of perfect adequacy in the modalities of expression, extracting from words all their potential suggestibility. He is fascinated by the task of presenting the beloved and the experience of love in terms that are evocative of an aesthetic delight. The whole of the variegated physical world around him, the whole panorama exposed to the senses, and the sentient life in all its fecundity to which he is keenly sensitive are all drawn on and have their impact on his power of visualization:

One cannot help feeling that the elemental images, of گل، بلبل are not used by Hafiz for purposes of embellishment but because of his intimate and close contact with palpable reality and for distancing his own emotional predicament. Of very frequent occurrence in his poetry is the image of صبا which, in particular, serves a dual purpose: it is the symbol of spirit and inspiration and it also is the medium of communication between the lover and the beloved, acquainting the latter with the anguish and desolation of the former. And similarly, symbolic of grace and stateliness, with  the addition of the suffix خواماں is evocative of the dynamic personality of the beloved. صبا also performs the function of the insinuator or غماز and carries with it the subtle suggestion of the intermediary; it scatters, moreover, the aroma of the beloved in far-flung corners of the earth. In order to emphasize the livingness of the present Hafiz is sometimes given to linking it with the past and revivifying it through the act of reminiscing thus:

It is evident that Hafiz is deeply intrigued by man’s existence in this world of space and time, his participation in the glories and triumphs of his earthly sojourn, his involvement in its vicissitudes at every point and his savouring of sensual delights, in all their keenness and intensity, so long as he can afford them in accordance with the emotional temperature of his life. It may, however, be added that this harking back to the past may also amount to a sort of nostalgia for the primordial mode of existence from which there has been a descent into this world.

Though equable, suave and mild-toned on the whole Hafiz is also given to challenging the status quo, his ebullient and combative spirit will not let him take things on their face value. Being a poet of massive energy and infinite resilience he proposes the restructuring of the universe around him and will have no commerce with either facile rationalism or illusionism created by our own fancies. His passionate protest against decadence and the struggle to emerge out of it is brought out even by the ringing tones of his voice. Come, he seems to be saying, let us split open the domed ceiling of the firmament, think of laying out a new world, pour heady wine into the goblet, scatter rose-petals and sweets into the incense-bearer, cross hands and feet in a sort of jazz movement, put the record of our doings straightaway before the Creator in the hope of getting a fair deal and engage  صباas a mediator: all these are, perhaps, gestures and strategies proposed for unfolding a new scheme of things as against the monotonous, soulless and mechanized routine of daily life. Mounting a powerful assault on things as they are Hafiz wishes to insinuate artfully his own vision of things. The juxtaposition of distinct and sometimes discordant images, hammering his view-point with insistent concern and denunciation of those who merely indulge in day-dreaming or pettifogging and have not enough courage to face the stark realities of life leave their imprint on Hafiz’s readers. He would like to create his own universe whose outline, however, nebulous at the moment, is likely to ensure the maximum freedom from the tyranny of the dogma. In an excellent, oft-quoted ghazal which is marked by the swirl of passion, the resonance of the soul and the energy of its kinetic images all the notions dwelt on just now have been fervently communicated and the reader cannot help falling under the spell of their creative verve and excitement:,

What is particularly noticeable here is the emotional pressure, built up little by little, and the superabundant energy at his disposal and its exploitation both for purposes of struggle and resistance and the eloquence of his utterance is climaxed h) saying:

The polarization of the world of the senses and of the spirit is something which is distinctive of Hafiz: his mind travels freely, and untrammelled, from one to the other; in other words, there is always the possibility that while his gaze is fixed on the mundane world he is really looking beyond its opaqueness to the transparency of the cosmic domain. Despite his firm grounding in the academic disciplines of the day, especially the Islamic sciences, Hafiz shows some awareness of the Kantian limits to human cognition, and human existence is therefore for him a riddle that defies comprehension. Following the lead of the merciless and exclusivizing logic, based on verifiable propositions, all our intellectual explorations are bound to land us ultimately in a blind alley whereas the grasp of the unfathomable Mystery depends upon some sort of inner impulse or supra-sensuous approach to things. While contemplating the paradoxes and ambivalence of life - the mingled yarn of good and evil - Hafiz has grown convinced that `the circle of our human understanding is a very restricted area’ and we are wrapped in a’ `cloud of unknowing’. Despite straining our capacities to the utmost we are still unable to make any sense of the great enigma and hence the vien of scepticism in Hafiz that is often revealed thus:

The second half of the first couplet underscores the strictly limited scope of the categories of knowledge: in the second O half of the fourth one, a distinction has been set up between Appearance and reality and in the fifth one the fact that man has been deliberately kept under delusion is no less apparent. Along-side these, may also be put the following couplets:

Here it is worth pointing out that are by an inversion of the accepted connotations, esoteric symbols of the intuitive processes of immediately apprehending Reality and جام جہاں بیں, in particular, is the means through which the inner secrets of the cosmos are laid bare to whoever is capable of handling it. Similarly mayرندان مست بادہ فروش  far from being the seller of wine and the intoxicants, are mystic appellations for those who have mastered these intuitive processes. This lends credence to the contention made earlier that the use of poetic symbols makes possible ambiguity in expressiveness and the couplets of Hafiz may not be tied to any literalist interpretation. And with this lack of definite commitment go also his tolerance of schism, his idealization of love as a creative impulse, and a cementing and cohesive force, his power of empathy and his imaginative openness, and all these seem to inhere into a broad and universal outlook on life. It may be added that the term ‘humanism’ as I applied to Hafiz does not imply just a substitute for religion as morality, art and mysticism are substitutes for many other thinkers and creative artists. In his case this concept rests on two premises: lack of intellectual acceptance of the dogma of institutionalized religion and faith in the goodness of human nature, and a corollary to it is adherence to the notion of individual freedom. Hafiz does scoff at the dogmatists but at bottom his sensibility is activated by a deeply religious consciousness which is reflected in his poetry in subtle and devious ways.

With the buoyancy of spirit that is pervasive in the ghazal of Hafiz and that contributes to the livingness of his world also goes his sparkling wit and the arched flight of his imagination in ridiculing the  واعظand theمحتسب . He is all the time engaged in deflating the self-appointed custodians of religious and moral ordinances whose malfunctioning is attended upon by bigotry and purblindness. Far from being indignant and vociferous Hafiz indulges in ironic effects with a view to exposing those who put on the cloak of hypocrisy or خرقۂ سالوس  alas he suggestively designates it : (hypocrisy should in all fairness be included among the seven Deadly Sins as visualized by the European Medievalists) with a certain sting of wry and lethal humour. What provokes his contempt and hatred of them is the wide and unbridgeable chasm which seems to yawn between their pretensions and actual practices in daily life. They are, moreover, formalists and accusers (and that way Satan’s accomplices and allies) as also unashamed apologists for the Church and the State, supporting their policy of repression and allowing hardly any latitude to the legitimate urges and cravings of the natural man. The pose of the non-conformist is struck by Hafiz for purposes of denouncing those who have turned religion into a commodity, thus denuding it of all its inner content - its moral and metaphysical postulates and imperatives. Those who impede or frustrate the life of love, whether Divine, that is, of man to God or profane, that is, of man to man, offer themselves as vulnerable to his scathing sarcasm, By temperament Hafiz is not inclined to express savage indignation against this class of sanctimonious divines: on the contrary, not unlike Ghalib, his withering scorn which results in bringing about their utter humiliation, is very often, though not always, expressed tangentially; they come to look, through Hafiz’s demolition of them, as stuffed men, incapable of genuine religious faith. Putting it differently, one might uphold that in Hafiz’s poetry, the coalescence of the witty and the shocking effects is achieved at the expense of those who suffer from sterility of faith and who do not hesitate to exploit the common believer with all the trickery and adroitness at their command:

The world of Hafiz’s poetry is radiant, alive and tingling with energy and movement, and he tends to accept life without any mental or moral inhibitions. He recognizes the sanctity and divinity of the life affirming impulses of man and does not reject anything which is likely to contribute to his happiness through self-realization. His poetry abounds in images of light and colour and the beauty of the phenomenal world feeds and nourishes these images. Of frequent occurrences are images of smell the acutest of man’s physical senses and these are the source of the peculiar fragrance in his poetry. All the luxuriant growth of a Persian garden : the roses, the jasmine, the tulips, the cypresses and the early morning breeze rustling through them and scattering their smells and odours far and wide - all these which are evocative of a powerful response seem to be reflected in the ghazals of Hafiz. In him however, there is hardly any concern with the interplay of light and shade and this may be accounted for, as in the case of Iqbal, too, by the Islamic emphasis on light alone as the fountain-head of all creative energy which propels the universe. As all fictional works are human artifacts so is the poetry of Hafiz and its architectonics has been designed with a degree of finesse and sophistication not witnessed in any other major Persian poet of repute. This poetry has a taste of earthiness about it and it is penetrated by flashes of light and a kind of sinous movement. It is not inward looking but smacks of the out-of-door life and is presented in the form of incandescent images and the lilt of harmony:

In the universe of Hafiz we do get the self-image of the lover as much as the portrayal of the beloved and in it the dominant images are those of dignity and power, or of self-awareness, in other words. He is given neither to self-abnegation nor self-prostration before the beloved: his bearing towards him bespeaks self-containedness and he goes to meet him on a footing of equality. Unlike the Petrarcian lover as also unlike the self-capitulating and dismal, conventional lover of Urdu poetry Hafiz is all the time conscious of his strength and dignity in the bargain of love. He is, however, not unmindful of his ravaged heart and sometimes feels nostalgic about the past. It is also worth pointing out that in Hafiz’s poetry the love of sentient as well as amorous life, with all the sensuousness clinging to it, co-exists with the lure of some sort of transcendence. References to life in pre-’ eternity or J;’ (anteriority without beginning) and in post-eternity or, AI (posteriority without end) are of frequent occurrence and so are those to some kind of hypothetical, primordial alliance or pact designated by him as پیمان الست Man seems to have a foothold both in this and the other world. He nostalgically recalls the life of love lived by the translucent soul in that other region and that seems to serve as a paradigm for the impetuous, physical love experienced here and now in this mundane context. It is not for nothing that the epithet (as in the famous couplet :

is reiterated so often and with such haunting cadence and it seems to imply not simply a backward-looking glance at the recent past but connotes, I should think, some sort of primordial existence at a not viable point of duration. One might as well uphold that through it the series of mere events is turned into the unity of vision. Life in its temporal focus or in the immediate mundane context is referred to as one which had started in the deserted cloister or منزل ویراں. The keen and intense desire to renounce it and undertake the backward journey to Jif provides a creative stimulus to the mind of the poet and keeps him in a state of flurry. He seems to be constantly oscillating between the temporal and the transcendental worlds, occupying a permanent station in neither. Similarly words like  حضوری(Presence) and the, point of time called (retreat) and phrases like شب ہجراں (Night of separation and  روز وصال(Day of Union) are also repeated very often, and significantly, and these connote separation from and union with the Divine, respectively. These two poles of Attraction and Repulsion, Continguity and Distance form part of the cycle of being just as drunkenness and its accessories and Nothingness and its coordinates are portion of the theophany of the Divine effusion: Further, solitude and nostalgia are the two perennial motifs in Hafiz’s poetry, and Hafiz did have an experience of the intoxication with and exaltation of the Infinite, and gazing at the face of the beloved reflects the unappeasable longing to catch a glimpse of the Divine effulgence :

To conclude one may maintain that Hafiz’s poetry, in spite of being tethered to the earth and reflecting as it does, the beauty and heterogeneity of the temporal setting and its concerns seems, nevertheless, to celebrate the effort and the triumph attendant upon it to transcend its limitations and priorities whenever possible.