The Conference of the Birds

Farid ud-Din Attar was a 12th-century Persian Sufi poet of Nishapur (in present-day Iran), a pharmacist by profession (his title Attar means druggist or perfumer) who turned his trade into the conceit of his most famous prose work — the Tadhkirat al-Awliya (Memorial of the Saints), a hagiography of the early Sufis. His poetry is no less considerable. Among his major works the Conference of the Birds (Mantiq-ut-Tayr, Speech of the Birds) is the most widely read.

The story

A vast assembly of birds is held by their leader, the hoopoe (the bird sent by Solomon to the Queen of Sheba in the Quranic narrative — emblematic of inspired guidance). The hoopoe announces that the birds have a king, the Simurgh, who dwells far to the east beyond impossible distances. The birds — variously enthusiastic, hesitant, and resistant — debate. The hoopoe answers each excuse: the nightingale’s plea that he cannot leave his rose; the parrot’s preference for his cage; the peacock’s vanity; the falcon’s loyalty to his prince; the partridge’s love of jewels. Each excuse is a soul’s attachment, and to each the hoopoe replies with a teaching tale — a hikayat drawn from the lives of saints, kings, and ordinary lovers — that names the attachment and offers [[daoism|the way]] past it.

The birds eventually agree and set out. They cross seven valleys, each marking a stage of the contemplative journey:

• The Valley of the Quest (Talab) — the active longing that begins the path
• The Valley of Love (‘Ishq) — when longing becomes unconditional
• The Valley of Knowledge (Ma’rifat) — direct knowing, distinct from intellectual learning
• The Valley of Detachment (Istighna) — the release of every attachment
• The Valley of Unity (Tawhid) — the recognition of the one reality behind all multiplicity
• The Valley of Bewilderment (Hayrat) — the place where ordinary categories fail
• The Valley of Annihilation (Fana) — the dissolution of the self

The journey kills most of the birds; only thirty arrive at the Simurgh’s palace. They are admitted, they look — and they see themselves: si murgh in Persian means thirty birds. The seeker is the sought. The pun is the climax of the poem, and the theological point is the heart of Sufi metaphysics: the divine is not somewhere else.

Why it has lasted

Three reasons:

1. The form is teachable. The frame story is clear; the embedded hikayat are short and memorable. A reader who never finishes the whole poem still carries away the structure.
2. The seven-valley map. Attar’s stages of the path have been used in Sufi formation for centuries — quoted, taught, debated, refined.
3. The pun. Si murgh / Simurgh is the most famous wordplay in Persian literature, and one that no translation can fully reproduce. It carries the metaphysical claim that the searched-for is the searcher.

On translations

• Edward FitzGerald produced an early English version (1899), best read as Victorian poetry rather than as a translation.
• C.S. Nott’s 1954 prose translation (from the French of Garcin de Tassy) was for a long time the standard English access.
• Afkham Darbandi & Dick Davis (Penguin Classics, 1984) is the standard modern verse translation in English — accurate, readable, beautifully produced.
• Sholeh Wolpé’s 2017 translation (Norton) is the most recent and is highly regarded.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Parallels: [[the-masnavi]]
• Member of: [[book]]
• Part of: [[sufism]]

Sources

1. Attar. The Conference of the Birds. Trans. Afkham Darbandi & Dick Davis. Penguin Classics, 1984. Source class: primary text / standard modern translation.
2. Attar. The Conference of the Birds. Trans. Sholeh Wolpé. Norton, 2017. Source class: primary text / contemporary translation.
3. Attar. Muslim Saints and Mystics (selections from Tadhkirat al-Awliya). Trans. A.J. Arberry. Routledge, 1966. Source class: primary text.
4. Annemarie Schimmel. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. University of [[asheville|North Carolina]] Press, 1975. (Sections on Attar.) Source class: book / scholarly survey.
5. Hellmut Ritter. The Ocean of the Soul: Men, the World, and God in the Stories of Farid al-Din Attar. Brill, 2003. Source class: book / definitive scholarly study.

Lenses still to grow

• Attar’s other works — the Tadhkirat, the Asrar-nama, the Ilahi-nama, the Musibat-nama. The Conference is the famous one but the corpus is larger.
• The si murgh pun as a piece of theology — its philosophical implications and its limits.
• The Peter Brook stage adaptation (1979) and the work’s wider 20th-century reception.
• Attar’s influence on Rumi in detail.