Title: The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr) Author: Farid ud-Din Attar Creation Date: c. 1177 Location: Nishapur, Persia
Summary
The birds of the world gather and learn that they have a king: the Simorgh, a mythical bird who dwells on the far side of the mountain of Qaf at the edge of the world. The hoopoe, wisest of birds, urges them to undertake the journey to find their king. But most birds offer excuses: the nightingale is too attached to the rose, the parrot to its golden cage, the peacock to its beauty, the hawk to its place at the king's wrist. Those who do set out must cross seven valleys — the valleys of Quest, Love, Knowledge, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, and finally Poverty and Annihilation. Most perish along the way. When the thirty surviving birds (si morgh in Persian) finally arrive at the court of the Simorgh, they discover the great pun at the heart of the poem: "si morgh" means "thirty birds." The Simorgh they sought was themselves all along. Looking into a cosmic mirror, they see that seeker and sought are one.
Why This Book Matters
The Conference of the Birds is the supreme allegorical poem of the Sufi tradition and one of the most architecturally perfect long poems in any language. Its central conceit — that the divine is not something external to be found but the deepest reality of the self — is the core insight of Islamic mysticism, and Attar dramatises it with a narrative elegance that makes the philosophical argument unforgettable. The poem's structure, with its seven valleys corresponding to stages of spiritual development, provided a template for Sufi thought that influenced Rumi (who acknowledged Attar as his predecessor) and countless subsequent mystics and poets. The pun on Simorgh/si morgh is one of the great literary devices in world literature — a word-play that contains an entire theology.
Historical Context
Attar lived in Nishapur in northeastern Iran during the 12th century, a period of political instability under the late Seljuk sultans but also of extraordinary intellectual and spiritual ferment. Nishapur was a major centre of Sufi activity and the city where Omar Khayyam had lived a generation earlier. Attar was a pharmacist (attar means "herbalist" or "perfumer") who composed his poetry alongside his profession. He lived through a time when Sufism was moving from a marginal, sometimes persecuted movement to a central force in Islamic culture and society. The Conference of the Birds draws on the vast repertoire of Sufi hagiography, teaching stories, and theological concepts that had accumulated over three centuries of mystical tradition. Attar is said to have been killed during the Mongol sack of Nishapur in 1221.
Literary Significance
Attar's formal achievement is the seamless integration of frame narrative, embedded tales, and philosophical argument. The journey of the birds provides the structural spine, but at every stage, the hoopoe tells stories — parables of kings, lovers, madmen, and saints — that illustrate the spiritual lesson of each valley. These embedded stories are themselves literary gems: compressed, vivid, often shocking in their images. The poem's movement from comedy (the birds' comical excuses) through suffering (the agonies of the journey) to mystical paradox (the discovery that they were what they sought) creates an emotional arc of genuine power. The multilevel wordplay, particularly the Simorgh/si morgh device, demonstrates how Persian poetry could embed metaphysical argument in linguistic structure itself.
Research Notes
The Conference of the Birds was identified as essential for representing the Sufi allegorical tradition in Persian literature. Attar's poem is also crucial as a predecessor to Rumi's Masnavi — Rumi famously said, "Attar was the soul and Sanai its two eyes; we came after Sanai and Attar." The Wolpe translation is the most poetically alive recent rendering; the Darbandi and Davis version is more scholarly. Peter Avery's translation is also respected. The poem's structure influenced not only Sufi literature but the broader Islamic tradition of allegorical journey narratives.
The Reading
The birds of the world have gathered together, every species from every land, and they are in turmoil. They have no king. Every other creature has a sovereign, a lord, a centre of allegiance — but the birds drift in disorder, each flying its own way, answerable to nothing. This cannot continue. They need a king.
Then the hoopoe steps forward. The hoopoe is no ordinary bird — she bears on her head the crown of truth, and she has journeyed where others have not. She tells the assembled birds that they do, in fact, have a king. His name is the Simorgh.
The birds are stirred, excited — but almost immediately, the excuses begin.
The nightingale speaks first: she cannot leave the rose. Her entire existence is love for the rose; she sings all night in ecstasy because of the rose; to leave the rose would be to die. The hoopoe answers sharply: "You have let a mere flower steal your heart. If the rose did not exist, your heart would still beat. You are in love with the form, not the reality. The rose withers in a week. You have sold eternity for a handful of petals."
The parrot, gleaming green in her golden cage, speaks next. She does not want freedom; she wants eternal life. The hoopoe replies that the desire for immortality is just another chain: "You are so afraid of death that you have forgotten to live. What good is eternal life in a cage?"
The peacock spreads his gorgeous tail and declares he is content in his garden — why should he seek anything more? "Your beauty," the hoopoe tells him, "is the very thing that deceives you. You are dazzled by your own feathers, and a thousand serpents have made their home in your display. That garden you love was the home of the first disobedience — remember who else lived in a garden and fell."
The duck protests that she cannot leave the water. The partridge cannot leave her jewels. The heron cannot leave the ocean. The hawk cannot leave the king's wrist — she sits at the hand of earthly power and has no need for spiritual sovereignty. The owl, hunched in his ruins, has found a treasure and wants only to guard it. Each bird has its own form of attachment, its own idol, its own excuse for refusing the journey.
To each, the hoopoe responds with a story. This is Attar's method — the great architecture of the poem. The birds' excuses and the hoopoe's replies are interspersed with hundreds of teaching tales, parables drawn from Sufi tradition, Persian legend, and the lives of saints and madmen. A king falls in love with a slave boy and gives up his throne. A dervish rebukes a sultan to his face and walks away unharmed. A man searches the world for his lost beloved only to discover she was standing behind him the whole time. Sheikh San'an, the holiest man of his age, dreams of a Christian girl in Byzantium, travels to find her, and in his shattering love for her abandons Islam, tends her swine, and is reviled by his followers — until love itself transforms and redeems him. Each story is a jewel, complete in itself, yet each illuminates the spiritual lesson the hoopoe is teaching.
At last, a great company of birds resolves to set out. They fly away from everything they know, from every comfort and attachment, toward the mountain of Qaf and the court of the Simorgh.
The journey is structured through seven valleys, each one a stage of the soul's progress toward God.
The Valley of the Quest is the first and the hardest to enter. Here the traveller must renounce everything — wealth, status, comfort, even the desire for reward. "When you enter this valley, your body will tremble, your heart will bleed, pain upon pain will crush you." The seeker must want the truth more than life itself, must be willing to sacrifice a hundred worlds for a single glimpse of the Beloved's face. The hoopoe tells the story of a princess who sees through her window a ragged beggar and falls so deeply in love that she abandons her palace, her jewels, her rank. Asked what she paid for this love, she replies: "Everything I had, and it was not enough."
The Valley of Love is next. Here reason is of no use. Love is an ocean of fire, and the lover must plunge in without calculation. "Love has nothing to do with the five senses and the six directions; its goal is only to experience the attraction exerted by the Beloved." The hoopoe tells of a moth drawn to a candle's flame. A wise moth, returning singed, tries to describe the fire, but another moth says the first moth knows nothing — and plunges directly into the flame and is consumed. "He alone who has been consumed by the flame knows its nature — and he can tell no one."
The Valley of Knowledge opens before them. But this is not the knowledge of books and scholars. It is a personal, direct knowing in which each traveller sees a different truth. "There are as many roads to God as there are souls on earth." The seeker discovers that the world is a dream, a shadow-play, and begins to perceive the hidden order behind the veil of appearances. But knowledge alone is not enough — it is a waystation, not a destination.
The Valley of Detachment demands the surrender of everything — not just possessions and pleasures, but desires, opinions, even the desire for detachment itself. "Here, one must forget everything one has known. A thousand worlds will appear at your feet, and you must pass them by as if they were nothing." The traveller becomes indifferent to existence and non-existence alike. A king offers a Sufi half his kingdom; the Sufi does not even bother to refuse — the offer is simply irrelevant.
The Valley of Unity is where the traveller perceives that all things are one. The many disappears into the One. Past and future, here and there, self and other — all distinctions dissolve. "If you see many or few, it is the curtain and not reality. All that exists is the One — the rest is illusion." A man comes to the door of his beloved and knocks. "Who is it?" she asks. "It is I," he replies. "Go away," she says. He returns after years of spiritual wandering, knocks again. "Who is it?" she asks. "It is you," he answers. And the door opens.
The Valley of Bewilderment follows, and here even the certainty of unity shatters. The traveller is plunged into confusion, contradiction, and anguish. Everything that was known becomes unknown. "I do not know whether I exist or do not exist, whether I am in love or not in love, whether I am sane or mad." This is not failure — it is the necessary destruction of the ego's last refuge: the belief that it understands. Attar compares it to a man lost in an ocean, unable to tell which way is up, drowning in wonder.
The Valley of Poverty and Annihilation is the last. Here, the self is extinguished entirely. The drop returns to the ocean and ceases to be a drop. "When the ocean surges, what use are the patterns drawn upon its surface?" This is fana — the annihilation of the individual self in the divine. It is not death but the end of the illusion that one was ever separate. The traveller does not find God. The traveller discovers that there was never anything but God.
Through these seven valleys, the birds fly. And at every stage, more birds fall away. They die of exhaustion, of thirst, of heartbreak. They are burned by the sun of the desert, frozen by the winds of the mountains, drowned in rivers of fire. The weak, the half-hearted, the proud, the doubting — one by one they drop away.
Of all the thousands that set out, only thirty birds survive the journey. Thirty ragged, battered, featherless creatures arrive at last at the court of the Simorgh. They are turned away at the gate — a chamberlain tells them they are not worthy. They persist. They are tested again. They persist. Finally, they are admitted.
And here Attar delivers the thunderclap at the heart of his poem, the pun that is also a revelation. In Persian, si morgh means "thirty birds." The thirty birds who arrive at the court of the Simorgh discover that the Simorgh is them. They look and see "the face of the Simorgh of the world — and when they looked at the Simorgh's face, they saw that it was the face of the thirty birds." A cosmic mirror is placed before them, and in it they see only themselves. Seeker and sought are one. The journey to find the king was the journey to become the king. The Simorgh was never elsewhere, never separate — it was the thirty birds all along, once they had been stripped of their attachments, their egos, their illusions of separateness.
"They were lost in the Simorgh — lost and yet found. Shadow disappeared in sun. And that is all."
Attar closes the poem with a final address. He acknowledges the impossibility of what he has attempted — to describe in words a reality that lies beyond words. He compares himself to a man who has seen the ocean and tries to carry it home in a jar. The poem is the jar. The ocean is elsewhere — and everywhere. "If the journey were a hundred thousand years, and if a hundred thousand birds had set out, they would arrive at the same truth: there was never anything other than the Simorgh. There was never anything other than God."
He signs off humbly, knowing that the poem has done what a poem can do — pointed the way — and that the walking must be done by each reader alone. "I have spoken. The rest is silence — and the flight."
This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →
The two recommended translations are Sholeh Wolpe's verse translation (W.W. Norton, 2017), the most poetically alive recent rendering, and the Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis translation (Penguin Classics), which is more scholarly and complete.
By Farid ud-Din Attar, translated by Sholeh Wolpe. The most poetically alive recent English version, in rhyming verse.
By Farid ud-Din Attar, translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis. The more scholarly rendering — complete, with extensive notes.
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