خرابات

What it means

خرابات (kharâbât) is the broken-down tavern of Persian Sufi poetry. The literal sense is “ruins, places that have fallen apart,” plural of خرابه (kharâbe). The word is Arabic in origin, related to خراب (kharâb, ruined). In the literal medieval setting it referred to derelict buildings on the edges of towns where the disreputable and the marginal gathered, often Zoroastrian wine-keepers (since Muslims were forbidden to sell wine, the trade fell to non-Muslim minorities). In Sufi poetry the word is lifted out of literal geography and made into the symbolic counter-space of the orthodox mosque. The kharâbât is where the seekers go when they have given up on the religion of appearances.

The poetic register

For Hafez especially, kharâbât is the privileged location of the spiritual life. The mosque represents legalistic religion, hypocrisy, the policed orthodoxy of the city. The kharâbât represents the inner life, ecstasy, the Sufi tavern where the seeker is served the wine of divine love by a saqi who may be the beloved or God or both. The opposition is constant in the ghazals: outside the mosque, the preacher sells empty piety; inside the kharâbât, the rend (the libertine-mystic) drinks and is transformed. The ruined tavern is not a real building. It is a moral and spiritual stance, a refusal to conduct one’s inner life in the spaces sanctioned by power.

How it appears in Persian poetry

The kharâbât appears across the Sufi canon as the place where transformation happens. The figure who presides there is پیر مغان (pir-e moghân, the old Magian, the Zoroastrian elder), and the figure who serves is the saqi. The seeker enters in his ordinary self and leaves in some condition closer to فنا. The tavern is described as ruined because conventional religious form has collapsed inside it: prayer beads are pawned for wine, the prayer mat is sold, the hypocrisy of the preacher is mocked. Hafez returns to the kharâbât more than any other Persian poet, and the persistence of the image across his Divan made it permanent in the tradition. Sanai and Attar set the precedent. Rumi uses the image more sparingly but in the same direction: ruin as the precondition for grace.

Cultural note

The kharâbât is one of the reasons Hafez was sometimes accused of heresy by literal-minded contemporaries and is sometimes still flattened into a drinking-poet by readers who miss the symbolic frame. Iranian readers learn to hold the literal and the metaphorical at once, and most educated Iranians would say that kharâbât in classical poetry almost always means the inner condition, not the actual tavern. The word survives in modern Persian only as a literary term: nobody uses خرابات in everyday speech to mean a real tavern. The image lives entirely inside the poetic register.

Related expressions

میخانه (meykhâne, wine-house, more neutral), میکده (meykade, smaller wine-house), پیر مغان (pir-e moghân, the old Magian), رند (rend, the libertine-mystic), ساقی (sâqi, the wine-bearer), می (mey, wine), صومعه (sowme’e, the orthodox monastery, the structural opposite of kharâbât). The kharâbât-mosque pair is the central spatial opposition in classical Sufi poetry.

References

• Dehkhoda
• Vajehyab