The Conference of the Birds

Farid al-Din Attar's Conference of the Birds is an allegorical Persian poem of roughly four and a half thousand couplets in which the birds of the world, led by the wise hoopoe, set out to find the Simorgh, a mythical king bird said to dwell beyond seven forbidding valleys, valleys of quest, love, insight, detachment, unity, bewilderment and finally poverty and annihilation. Most of the birds abandon the journey along the way, each for a reason the poem uses to illustrate a particular spiritual failing, so that the surviving thirty who finally reach the Simorgh's dwelling discover, through a pun the Persian language makes possible, that si morgh literally means thirty birds, and that they themselves collectively are the king they had been seeking all along.

The poem's structure, a frame narrative of the collective journey interspersed with dozens of shorter embedded stories the hoopoe tells to answer each bird's objection, made it enormously effective as a teaching text, since a reader absorbs Attar's account of the spiritual path as much through the accumulated weight of these smaller stories as through the main allegory itself. Attar frames the whole journey within a Quranic and Persian poetic idiom familiar to his original audience, so that even readers who set aside the allegorical frame can follow much of the poem simply as an anthology of moral tales.

Attar's seven valleys became one of the most widely used maps of spiritual progress in the whole Persian Sufi literary tradition, cited and adapted by later poets and teachers as a way of describing stages of the path even outside the specific frame of the bird allegory that first presented them. Knysh's history of Islamic mysticism situates the Conference of the Birds within the broader flowering of didactic Sufi poetry in twelfth century Persia, a period in which allegory and narrative became the preferred vehicles for teaching doctrine that earlier generations had expressed in more directly theological prose.

The poem's ending, in which the seekers discover that what they sought was in some sense already themselves, is frequently read as a poetic expression of the same non dualist intuition found in more technical form in writers such as Ibn Arabi, though Attar reaches it through story and wordplay rather than through systematic metaphysics. The work has remained continuously popular from its composition to the present, translated repeatedly into European languages and still widely read as an introduction to Persian Sufi literature for readers with no specialist background in Islamic mysticism.