The Conference of the Birds (Penguin)

by Farid al-Din Attar

  THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS

  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. He is said to have been educated at the theological school attached to the shrine of Imam Reza at Mashhad (a major centre of pilgrimage) and later to have travelled to Rey (the ancient Raghes, near modern Tehran), Egypt, Damascus, Mecca, Turkestan and India. After his wanderings he settled in his home town, where he kept a pharmacy, and it was there that he wrote his poems. Later in his life he was apparently tried for heresy; the charge was upheld and Attar was banished and his property looted. 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.

  DICK DAVIS was born in 1945 and educated at King's College, Cambridge, where he read English, and at the University of Manchester (Ph.D. in Persian Literature). He lived in Iran for eight years (1970–78) and has also lived in Italy and Greece. He is Professor of Persian at Ohio State University, USA. He has published six books of poetry, critical works and translations from Italian as well as from Persian. He translated The Legend of Seyavash by Ferdowsi for Penguin Classics, and also edited Edward FitzGerald’s Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam for Penguin. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  AFKHAM DARBANDI was born in 1948 in Tehran, where she grew up. She trained as a nurse and then as a translator. She and Dick Davis were married in 1974.

  FARID UD-DIN ATTAR

  Translated with an Introduction by

  Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  This translation first published 1984

  28

  Copyright © Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis, 1984

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  9780141920955

  THIS TRANSLATION IS DEDICATED TO

  THE MEMORY OF MARIAM DARBANDI,

  1956–1983

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS

  BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  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; this also suggests that a birth-date closer to 1120 than 1157 is likely. He is said to have spent much of his childhood being educated at the theological school attached to the shrine of Imam Reza at Mashhad (the largest town in northeastern Iran and a major centre of pilgrimage), and later to have travelled to Key (the ancient Raghes, near modern Tehran), Egypt, Damascus, Mecca, Turkestan (southern Russia) and India. Such itineraries are common in the lives of Persian poets of this period, and it was clearly usual for them, like their counterparts in medieval Europe, the troubadours and wandering scholars, to travel from place to place in search of knowledge or patronage or both. Attar’s travels seem to have been undertaken more in the pursuit of knowledge than patronage; he boasted that he had never sought a king’s favour or stooped to writing a panegyric (this alone would make him worthy of note among Persian poets). 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.

  After his wanderings he settled again in his home town, where he presumably kept his daru-khané. 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. Edward G. Browne* points out that this was a not uncommon fate for Persian mystical poets to endure, and that in his last book, Lisanu’l Ghaib, Attar ‘compares himself to Nasir-e-Khosrow, who, like himself, “in order that he might not look on the accursed faces” of his persecutors, retired from the world and “hid himself like a ruby in Badakhshan”.’ The Conference of the Birds contains many anecdotes about sufis who suffered for their beliefs; and if Attar was attacked for his writings, the experience cannot have been a surprise to him.

  However, he was back in Neishapour at the time of his death, which is variously given as having occurred between 1193 and 1235. One of the dates most favoured among early writers is 1229, the year of the Mongols’ sack of Neishapour during their devastating sweep westwards, which took them to Baghdad and beyond. If Attar was born around 1120 he would have been well over a hundred years old at this time, and it seems more likely that his biographers have been seduced by the pathetic picture of the saintly old poet butchered by the barbarian hordes than that he actually did live so long. A date shortly before 1220 is more probable, though even this would mean that he was in his nineties when he died.

  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; Ansari’s tomb in Herat was once a magnificently adorned place of pilgrimage – it still exists in a more or less dilapidated state – and Rumi’s tomb at Konya is to this day maintained in lavish splendour.) Both Attar’s tomb and Omar Khayyam’s were restored in
the 19305 –Attar’s with rather more discretion than Khayyam’s; the building that now houses the tomb is surrounded by a small garden.

  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. Sufism was an esoteric system, partly because it was continually accused of being heretical, partly because it was held to be incomprehensible and dangerous if expounded to those who had not received the necessary spiritual training. It was handed down within orders of adepts, who were forbidden to reveal the most important tenets of belief (though some occasionally did), from sheikh to pupil (throughout The Conference of the Birds the word ‘sheikh’ denotes a spiritual leader, not a secular chief). Different sufis living at different times have clearly believed different things, and most sufi authors tend to retreat into paradox at crucial moments, either because they feel their beliefs are genuinely inexpressible by other means or because they fear orthodox reprisal.

  The doctrine is elusive, but certain tenets emerge as common to most accounts. These, briefly, are: 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. The doctrine received its most extreme expression in the writings of the Spanish Arab pantheist Ibn Arabi, a contemporary of Attar, who maintained that the being of creation and the Creator are indivisible. In The Conference of the Birds Attar frequently seems to be about to propound the same doctrine, only to step back at the last moment and maintain a final distinction between God and His creatures.

  Attar’s own connection with sufism is not entirely clear. It is not possible, for example, to identify incontrovertibly the sheikh from whom he received instruction, or even to state with certainty which order he belonged to. J. Spencer Trimingham, in his excellent book The Sufi Orders in Islam (Oxford, 1971), says that his sheikh was Majd ad-Din al-Baghdadi (died 1219) of the Kubrawiya order; however, E. G. Browne quotes a Persian source to the effect that though Majd ad-Din was Attar’s teacher it was medicine that he taught him, not the Way of sufism. There is another persistent tradition (first mentioned by Rumi, whom Attar is said to have dandled on his knee as a child and whose poetry is considered by Persians to be the ne plus ultra of mystical literature) that Attar had in fact no teacher and was instructed in the Way by the spirit of Mansur al-Hallaj, the sufi martyr who had been executed in Baghdad in 922 and who appeared to him in a dream.

  The two traditions are not wholly exclusive; Attar may have belonged, to an order and have had a confirmatory dream in which Hallaj appeared to him. 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. My own guess – it is no more than that – is that the tradition of his instruction by the spirit of Hallaj is a dramatic symbol of his scholarly preoccupation with the lives of dead sufis.

  Attar shows a particular interest in the lives of two sufis, al-Hallaj and Bistami (or ‘Bayazid’, as Attar calls him). Both, significantly enough, were representatives of the more extreme, antinomian and, to many of the orthodox, scandalous tendencies of sufism. Hallaj was a Persian who wrote in Arabic (Arabic occupied the position in Islamic Asia and Africa that Latin held in medieval Christian Europe, and many authors used it in preference to their own vernacular languages). He broke with the sufi tradition of secrecy and openly taught mystical doctrines; his most famous pronouncement, made while in a state of religious exaltation, was ‘I am the Truth’ (or even ‘I am God’: the relevant word, haq, can mean either ‘God’ or ‘truth’). 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. Some of his followers fled to Khorasan (north-eastern Iran, where Attar was born), where his ideas were first incorporated into Persian verse by Abou Said Aboul Kheir; they became the staple of Persian mystical literature when they were taken up by Sana’i, and after him by Attar and then Rumi. 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; his death was seen as a warning of the world’s hostility to sufism, which became ever more secretive, paradoxical and esoteric. The poet Hafez goes so far as to imply that Hallaj died because he had revealed what should be hidden; that is, though to the orthodox his death may have been a punishment for blasphemy, to the sufis it was a punishment for the revelation of a mystery.

  Bistami or Bayazid (Bistam, which is about halfway between Rey and Neishapour, was his birthplace) was a famous ascetic associated with the ‘ecstatic’ rather than the ‘sober’ sufi path (the ‘sober’ way was associated with Junaid of Baghdad). 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 condemna tion, perhaps by feigning madness, and died in 874 in Bistam. His tomb was made into a very beautiful shrine by the Mongol Ilkhan Uljeitu in the early fourteenth century; much of this shrine still exists. Attar is one of the chief sources for anecdotes about Bistami’s life. Trimingham quotes al-Hujwiri, the author of one of the most important medieval texts on sufism, as saying that Bistami’s teaching was ‘characterized by ghalaba (rapture, ecstasy) and sukr (intoxication); whereas that derived from al-Junaid is based on sobriety (sahw)’. The two schools were not seen as opposed, and Attar mentions Junaid with respect, but he is clearly more taken up with the Khorasanian tradition; he was, after all, born in Khorasan and probably imbibed its particular emphases early in his education.

  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.

  A poet of the generation before Attar, Sana’i (who died around 1150, when Attar was probably in his twenties), had done more or less just this in his Hadiqatu’l Haqiqat (The Garden of the Truth), in which sufi doctrine is mixed with a great deal of extraneous matter. 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. E. G. Browne, with characteristic forthrightness, called it ‘in my opinion one of the dullest books in Persian, seldom risin
g to the level of Martin Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy, and as far inferior to the Mas-navi of Jalalu’d Din Rumi as is Robert Montgomery’s Satan to Milton’s Paradise Lost’.* This is an extreme view, but compared to Attar’s work, Sana’i’s is undeniably patchy and dull. Attar’s great advance on Sana’i’s beginning was to present the sufi doctrine in an extended allegorical form which is itself continually interesting and amusing, which has moments of great psychological insight, humour and narrative suspense, and which gives the poem – over its four and a half thousand lines – a convincingly unfolded narrative structure. In other words he has transformed belief into poetry, much in the way that Milton or Dante did.

  The allegorical framework of the poem is as follows: the birds of the world gather together to seek a king. They are told by the hoopoe that they have a king – the Simorgh – but that he lives far away and the journey to him is hazardous. The birds are at first enthusiastic to begin their search, but when they realize how difficult the journey will be they start to make excuses. The nightingale, for example, cannot leave his beloved; the hawk is satisfied with his position at court waiting on earthly kings; the finch is too afraid even to set out, and so on. The hoopoe counters each of their excuses with anecdotes which show how their desires and fears are mistaken. The group flies a little way, formally adopts the hoopoe as its leader, and then decides to ask a series of questions about the Way before proceeding. These questions are also answered by illustrative anecdotes. The last question is about the length of the journey, and in answer the hoopoe describes the seven valleys of the Way. The journey itself is quickly dealt with and the birds arrive at the court of the Simorgh. At first they are turned back; but they are finally admitted and find that the Simorgh they have sought is none other than themselves. The moment depends on a pun – only thirty (si) birds (morgh) are left at the end of the Way, and the si morgh meet the Simorgh, the goal of their quest.