Hafezean Critical Piety

Hafez was not a metaphysician, thankfully. He was a poet and, as a poet, he was far better equipped than any metaphysician before or since to articulate a critical piety worthy of the name.

For Hafez, brooding upon a beloved provides us with an intimation of the god who holds our fate in his hands and yet plays hard to get. If one were to ask him, "What sort of god is that?" he probably would have replied, "The one we're stuck with."

It is in brooding upon such a beloved that we learn to practice patience, mercy, long-suffering in love. At the same time, in the course of such brooding we acquire a keen sense of irony and of history. As the Malamatiyya would say, this is how we acquire rujuliyya (virtus).

To find ourselves naught but fleeting moments in the life of God does not imply passivity but active struggle: to understand, to remain faithful, and yet, in Jobean fashion, to protest our treatment.

It is precisely because one is poor in spirit that criticism becomes necessary. The quarrel with god is a lover's quarrel. It is, likewise, a refusal of all pious cant.