In the mystical Sufi tradition of Islam poetry, music, art, and dance are highly valued. One theme that is present, especially in Sufi poetry, is that of wine and drunkenness. Sheyagan writes, “Islam’s prohibition against drinking alcohol meant that within the Islamic world the making and serving of wine fell to Zoroastrians and Christians and others.”[1] However, poets like Hafiz and Rumi write of taverns and drunkenness. In these poems the tavern “usually suggests an esoteric sanctuary or gathering, an assembly of believers, which exists beyond the borders of orthodox Islam.”[2] In these poems, the drunkard is seen as having spiritual insight that the rigidly sober person does not. Renard writes, “God is wine, and the lover cannot but become intoxicated; but the hapless drunk then becomes a pariah, scandalously preferring tavern to mosque. It is true that drunkenness blurts out stark realities that sobriety will not suffer; but sobriety’s penchant for control and fear of ecstasy can leave one trapped in oneself.”[3]
J.T.P. deBruijn writes that in Sufi mystical poetry the poet often asks the cup-bearer for a drink. “[T]he poet seeks comfort in intoxication for the pain caused by his love, for the wrongs afflicted by the World or the inexorable passing of Time. Even in secular poems, wine therefore may adopt the figurative meaning of a means of escape from a cruel reality into a realm of hope and illusions about the fulfillment of love.” (65)
Consider the following examples of poems where wine is a mystical theme.
The poet Ibn al-Farid writes,
Joyless in this life is he that lives sober, and he that dies not drunk will miss the path of wisdom.
Let him weep for himself—he whose life is wasted without part or lot in wine![4]
An excerpt from Hafiz’s ghazal 29 states,
Last night I saw angels knock on the tavern door.
They kneaded the clay of Adam and molded it into a cup.
Those who live in the veiled and chaste sanctuary of Heaven
drank strong wine with me, the wandering beggar.
In Ghazal 48 he writes,
Last night I went to the tavern door stained with sleep,
my cloak-hem soaked, my prayer mat stained with wine.
In Ghazal 14,
Don’t frighten us with reason’s prohibitions, and bring wine,
for that watchman has no authority in our province.
Rumi writes,
Little by little the drunkards congregate, little by little the wine-worshippers arrive.
He then proceeds to describe those who are spiritual, “The souls of the pure ones like the rays of the sun are arriving from such a height to the lowly ones.”
With these excerpts we see joy, prayer, and spiritual insight associated with wine and that even angles find themselves at the tavern. Further, drunkenness is often associated with a dream state, when one is able to tap into the spiritual.
For this project, I show empty bottles of wine, one with the Arabic script for ‘Allah’ on the inside. The idea here is that in order to get closer to God, one must become intoxicated by wine and God’s love. The photograph is intentionally imperfect – the angle is skewed, the lighting is poor, and the wine bottles are somewhat out of focus – and suggests the intoxicated state of the photographer. I wanted to show a modern visual representation of the mystical night at the tavern.
[1] Hafiz, The Green Sea of Heaven, Trans. Elizabeth Gray, (Ashland: White Cloud Press, 2002) 9.
[2] Ibid., 9-10.
[3] John Rendard, Seven Doors to Islam: Spirituality and the Religious Life of Muslims (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 114.
[4] Ibid., 119.