Commonplaces from The Conference of the Birds by Farid Attar

Introduction

FARID UD-DIN ATTAR, the Persian mystic-poet, was born during the twelfth century at Neishapour (where Omar Khayyam had also been born) in northeast Iran. His date of birth is given by different authorities at various times between 1120 and 1157; the earlier date is more likely.

However, he had returned to Neishapour at the time of his death, which was probably shortly before 1220. His other chief works are The Book of the Divine, The Book of Affliction and The Book of Secrets.

He translated The Legend of Seyavash by Ferdowsi for Penguin Classics, and also edited Edward FitzGerald’s Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam for Penguin.

The Conference of the Birds (Manteq at-Tair) is the best-known work of Farid ud-Din Attar, a Persian poet who was born at some time during the twelfth century in Neishapour (where Omar Khayyam had also been born), in north-east Iran, and died in the same city early in the thirteenth century. His name, Attar, is a form of the word from which we get the ‘attar’ of ‘attar of roses’ and it indicates a perfume seller or druggist. Attar wrote that he composed his poems in his daru-khané, a word which in modern Persian means a chemist’s shop or drug-store, but which has suggestions of a dispensary or even a doctor’s surgery; and it is probable that he combined the selling of drugs and perfumes with the practice of medicine. His date of birth is given by different authorities at various times between 1120 and 1157; modern writers have inclined towards the earlier date. Two manuscript copies of The Conference of the Birds give the date of its completion as 1177, and on internal evidence one would judge it to be the work of a writer well past his youth;

Though The Conference of the Birds is about the search for an ideal, spiritual king, Attar obviously had a low opinion of most earthly rulers; he usually presents their behaviour as capricious and cruel, and at one point in the poem he specifically says it is best to have nothing to do with them. The knowledge he particularly sought was concerned with the biographies and sayings of Islamic saints; these he collected together in his prose work Tadhkirat al-Auliya (Memorials of the Saints), which became an important source book for later hagiographers.

There is some evidence that late in his life he was tried for heresy – reading The Conference of the Birds it is not difficult to see why, though the accusation was made against a different poem. The charge was upheld, Attar was banished and his property was looted.

However, he was back in Neishapour at the time of his death, which is variously given as having occurred between 1193 and 1235.

A memorial stone was erected over Attar’s tomb in the late fifteenth century, and the site is still maintained as a minor shrine. (The tombs of Persian mystical poets have commonly become shrines;

The Conference of the Birds is a poem about sufism, the doctrine propounded by the mystics of Islam, and it is necessary to know something about this doctrine if the poem is to be fully appreciated.

only God truly exists, all other things are an emanation of Him, or are His ‘shadow’; religion is useful mainly as a way of reaching to a Truth beyond the teachings of particular religions – however, some faiths are more useful for this than others, and Islam is the most useful; man’s distinctions between good and evil have no meaning for God, who knows only Unity; the soul is trapped within the cage of the body but can, by looking inward, recognize its essential affinity with God; the awakened soul, guided by God’s grace, can progress along a ‘Way’ which leads to annihilation in God.

His collection of sayings and anecdotes connected with the lives of sufi saints, Memorials of the Saints (many such anecdotes also appear in The Conference of the Birds), suggests a bookish, rather scholarly man interested in the lives of those who had gone before him.

He was imprisoned for eight years, then tried and condemned to death; he was flogged, mutilated, hung on a gibbet and then decapitated; his body was burned and the ashes were scattered in the Tigris.

The statement ‘I am the Truth’ was considered a declaration of the non-existence of the Self which has been re-absorbed into the true reality, i.e. God;

Like Hallaj, Bistami is said to have attained a state of annihilation in God, and like Hallaj he proclaimed the fact in utterances that scandalized the orthodox (‘Glory to Me! How great is My majesty!’ – he claimed to have had a vision of the throne of God and to have seen himself sitting on it). However, he escaped outright condemnation, perhaps by feigning madness,

Sufism was never simply a doctrine to which one intellectually assented; it was also a discipline for life, and its adepts followed a carefully prescribed ‘Way’. To quote Trimingham again, ‘[readers unacquainted with the writings of sufis] could have no better introduction than Attar’s Manteq at-Tair (The Conference of the Birds) where the seven valleys traversed by the birds of the quest are: Search, Love, mystic Apprehension, Detachment/Independence, Unity, Bewilderment, and Fulfilment in Annihilation… The purpose of the discipline… is to achieve purification. The aspirant has: to purify his nafs, i.e. his personality-self, from its inclination to shahawat, that is, the thoughts and desires of the natural man, and substitute these with love (mahabba); then he must be cast into the flames of passion (ishq) to emerge in the state of union (wusla) with transmutation of self (fana) through the gifts of dazzlement and wonder (haira) to everlastingness (baqa).’ Attar’s poem then is a description of the stages encountered by the adept of the sufis’ Way.

The poem is significant as being the first of the three famous long narrative Persian poems written in couplets which expound sufi teachings – the other two are Attar’s Manteq at-Tair and Rumi’s Masnavi-e-Ma’navi – but is by far the least popular of the three and owes its fame to chronological pre-eminence rather than to intrinsic excellence.

he has transformed belief into poetry, much in the way that Milton or Dante did.

In Kalila and Dimna animals talk and act as humans; the fables usually have a moral point to them, and their narratives are allegories of human characteristics and failings. This is precisely the method of Attar’s Conference of the Birds, and the two works also show a similar kind of folksy humour. Another work which probably influenced Attar when he came to write his poem is the short Arabic treatise The Bird by Avicenna. This is the first-person narrative of a bird (clearly representing the human soul) who is freed from a cage by other birds, and then flies off with his new companions on a journey to the ‘Great King’. The group flies over eight high mountain peaks before reaching the king’s court; there are a few moments when Attar seems to echo Avicenna’s imagery.

At the beginning the birds are identified by their species (and each species clearly indicates a human type: the nightingale is the lover, the finch is the coward, etc.); and they make excuses, according to their kind, for not going on the journey. Once the journey has begun the birds ask questions about its course, and here the analogy is much more that of a beginner on the spiritual path asking his sheikh about the trials he is likely to encounter. Each section (except for the opening and closing pages) therefore begins with a bird questioning the hoopoe (or arguing with him) and continues with the hoopoe’s answer. Each answer usually contains two or three stories which illustrate the particular point the hoopoe is making; the stories are linked together by admonition and commentary.

Many of the stories at first reading seem obscure. This obscurity is certainly, in part at least, intentional; the reader is being asked to look at some problem in an unfamiliar way, and logic is often deliberately flouted so that we are, as it were, teased or goaded – rather than logically led – into understanding. The paradoxical koans of Zen Buddhism are an analagous phenomenon. And, nearer home, Bunyan, in the prefatory poem to the second part of his Pilgrim’s Progress, counters the objection that ‘his words and stories are so dark / They know not how, by them, to find his mark’ with lines that could well stand at the head of Attar’s poem:

And to stir the mind To search after what it fain would find,

Things that seem to be hid in words obscure

Do but the godly mind the more allure

To study what those sayings should contain

That speak to us in such a cloudy strain. I also know a dark similitude Will on the fancy more itself intrude,

And will stick faster in the heart and head

Than things from similes not borrowèd.

The obscurities are there to ‘allure’ the mind, and the ambiguities of the allegory are the ‘dark similitude’ which ‘will stick faster in the heart and head’. For example, Attar will tell a story about two people, one of whom is clearly God, the other the aspirant sufi, but just as the reader has worked out which is which he will find that he has to change his mind or suspend judgement; the long story with which the poem closes is a good example of this. The reader’s attempts to explain the allegory to himself are what make it ‘stick fast’. But though much of the poem is deliberately in a ‘cloudy strain’ it is certainly not meant to be read in a state of hazy unrelieved incomprehension. Some of what at first sight seems obscure will be clarified if the reader pays attention to the context of each story. (This is why it is not really a good idea to dip into the book at random; it is meant to be read through, at least section by section.)

A bird has asked the hoopoe why he (the hoopoe) is spiritually successful whereas all the other birds get nowhere. The hoopoe says it is because Solomon has glanced at him; he goes on to say that this glance is worth far more than prayer. However, this does not mean that one need not pray – on the contrary, one should pray unceasingly until Solomon glances at one. There follows the story of the fisherboy; we now see that the boy’s constant fishing (he comes to fish in the same spot every day) represents the spiritual ‘fishing’ of constant prayer; the king’s visit is the glance of Solomon. The story is about individual effort as well as grace and the fact that both are necessary for spiritual progress.

Two themes in particular are diffused throughout almost the entire poem – the necessity for destroying the Self, and the importance of passionate love. Both are mentioned in every conceivable context and not only at the ‘appropriate’ moments within the scheme. The two are connected: the Self is seen as an entity dependent on pride and reputation; there can be no progress until the pilgrim is indifferent to both, and the commonest way of making him indifferent is the experience of overwhelming love. Now the love Attar chooses to celebrate (and the stories that deal with love are easily the most detailed and the longest of the poem) is of a particular kind; it is always love that flies in the face of either social or sexual or religious convention.

Attar’s concern to demonstrate that the sufis’ truth exists outside of human conventions also appears in his predilection for stories in which a poor, despised person (a dervish or beggar) is shown as spiritually superior to a great lord or king; and, in common with other sufi poets, Attar will use words like ‘fool’ or ‘idiot’ to mean ‘wise man’ or ‘saint’.

Readers acquainted with medieval European literature will not find Attar’s method unfamiliar; parallels such as The Owl and the Nightingale and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls immediately suggest themselves. Indeed, it is remarkable how close Attar’s poem frequently is in tone and technique to medieval European classics. Like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, it is a group of stories bound together by the convention of a pilgrimage, and as in Chaucer’s work the convention allows the author to present a panorama of contemporary society; both poems can accommodate widely differing tones and subjects, from the scatological to the exalted to the pathetic (and, occasionally, it must be admitted, the bathetic); both authors delight in quick character sketches and brief vignettes of quotidian life. With Dante’s Divine Comedy Attar’s poem shares its basic technique, multi-layered allegory, and a structure that leads us from the secular to the Divine, from a crowded, random world, described with a great poet’s relish for language and observation, to the ineffable realm of the Absolute. And in the work of all three authors we can discern a basic catholicity of sympathy, at odds with the stereotypes of inflexible exclusiveness often associated with both medieval Roman Catholicism and medieval Islam.

His obsession with idolatory is part of a general Islamic concern, but in The Conference of the Birds, as in a great deal of sufi poetry, the true idol to be destroyed is the Self. Of especial significance is Attar’s use of the imagery of fire to indicate religious exaltation; pre-Islamic Iran had been Zoroastrian, and the Zoroastrians worshipped fire; the ‘fire-worshippers’ of Persian mystical poetry are yet another symbol for an antinomian religious fervour scandalous to the orthodox. In the same way Persian poets, including Attar, use the intoxication induced by wine – forbidden to Moslems – as a metaphor for the ‘forbidden’ intoxications of mysticism. In the story of the Arab who has all his goods stolen while travelling in Persia (pp. 176–7), the Arab represents the follower of the formal, outward path, of religion; the bandits are the sufis, who follow the inward path of mysticism and spiritual poverty; the wine which makes the Arab drunk and which enables the bandits to strip him of his outward wealth is the sufi doctrine.

Alexander Fraser Tytler’s admirable Essay on the Principles of Translation (first published in 1791),

Attar’s tone shifts from the exalted to the sarcastic, from the witty to the indignant;

A. J. Arberry’s translation of episodes from Attar’s Tadh-kirat al-Auliya (London, 1966).

Prologue

I’ve seen a wondrous workshop where men shed the selves that they born with, as if dead ET CETERA 12

The Conference of the Birds

A king is not one of those common fools who snatches at a crown and thinks he rules. ET CETERA 56

Hallaj was taken up to the gallows tree ET CETERA 126 Cf. Tree of life

Whoever fights death with his sword ET CETERA 128 Cf. He who lives by the sword

To seek death is death’s only cure — ET CETERA``130-131 memento mori

While you are locked within yourself your cares Are worthless as your worthless cries and prayers. If you would soar beyond the circling sky, First free yourself from thoughts of "me" and "I"; If any thought of self-hood stains your mind An empty void is all the Self will find; If any taste of self-hood stays with you Then you are damned whatever you may do. If self-hood beckons you for but one breath A rain of arrows will decide your death. While you exist endure the spirit’s pain; A hundred times bow down, then bow again But if you cling to self-hood and its crimes, Your neck will feel Fate’s yoke a hundred times. 163

The saddest soul is freed from every care;

There is no sorrow He cannot console —

On Him depends the sky’s revolving bowl. 167

He saw the other’s state but not his own, And in this blindness: he. is not alone; You cannot love, and this is why you seek To find men vicious, or depraved, or weak — If you could search for love and persevere The sins of other men would disappear. 169

The lover who saw a blemish in his beloved’s eye

[insert commonplace here] 169

Eblis and God’s curse

The lover is a man who flares and burns, Whose face is fevered, who in frenzy yearns, Who knows no prudence, who will gladly send A hundred worlds toward their blazing end, Who knows of neither faith nor blasphemy, Who has no time for:doubt.or certainty, To whom both good and evil are the same, And who is neither, but a living flame. 186

The lover who slept

The lover who saved his beloved from drowning

I have no certain knowledge any more; I doubt my doubt, doubt itself is unsure; I love, but who is it for whom I sigh: Not Muslim, yet not heathen; who am I? My heart is empty, yet with love is full; My own love is to me incredible." 212

I’ve read a hundred books on chastity And still I burn — what good are they to me? 214

Epilogue

I’ve said but little of myself, although All those who grasp what discourse is will know The jewels I’ve scattered guarantee that I Will live till Judgement Day, and when I die I’ll live on men’s tongues, and this memory Among mankind will be enough for me. If the nine spheres should perish, this account Will not diminish by the least amount, And if its words remove the veil, and show Even one man the Way that he must go So that he’s comforted by what he’s read, Then may he pray for me when I am dead. I’ve strewn my roses here; remember me, My friends, when I am gone, with sympathy! Since, after his own fashion, each man shows A little of himself, then quickly goes, Like those who’ve gone before, I, with my words, Have shown to sleeping men their souls as birds. And if these words can prompt one heart to wake From lifelong stupor for their mystery’s sake, I’ll know, I’ll have no doubt, that all my pain And grief are over, and were not in vain I will have been a lamp, a candle’s light That burns itself, and makes the whole world bright. 249

How will you know the truths religion speaks While you’re philosophizing with the Greeks? How can you be a man of faith while you re Still wrapped up in their philosophic lore? It someone travelling on love’s Way should say Philosophy’, he doesn’t know love’s Way; 251

Better, by God, the ‘B’ for blasphemy, Than ‘P’ that stands for their Philosophy: Once blasphemy’s thin veil is torn, you'll find It easy to dispel it from your mind; Philosophy, though, snares you with its ‘why’s And ‘how’s, and mostly it ensnares the wise. Is this the light within your heart? Disdain it, As Omar burned the volumes that contain it;‘ Faith’s candle burned Greek wisdom, and since then It lights no candles in the hearts of men. Medina’s wisdom is enough, my friend, Throw dirt on Greece, and all that Greece might send. 252

O God, Accomplisher of everything Creator and Preserver, mighty King, All our fine acts are but one drop of dew Within the sea of grace here that is You. You are the world’s stay, Absolute in essence, And out of chivalry withhold Your presence; Forgive our filth and grime; don’t scrutinize Our foolish failings — hide them from our eyes. 262