Book Reviews 145

The Conference of the Birds:
The Selected Sufi Poetry of Farid ud-Din Attar

Raficq Abdulla
Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2003. 93 pages.

In medieval Islamic civilization, poetry was widely acknowledged to be the
most intimate vessel for conveying Sufism’s hidden truths. The spiritual
states and stations traversed by adepts along an ascending path to the reality
of God’s unity largely defies simple descriptions into ordinary prose or
everyday language. The subtleties necessary to evocatively describe a spiri-
tual journey that is, by its very essence, ineffable, necessitates a linguistic
medium that could at once reveal secrets of inner contemplation and mysti-
cal perception while simultaneously concealing such information from the
“uninitiated” behind the exoteric understanding of the same work of litera-
ture. Persian poetry, with its unique capacity for metaphorical symbolism,
puns, and paradoxes, thus emerged by the seventh/thirteenth century as an
unparalleled vehicle for expressing the mystical experience.

The most dramatic expression in all of Persian mystical literature of this
spiritual journey is the allegorical poem Mantiq al-Tair (best translated as
“The Speech of the Birds”) by Farid al-Din `Attar (d. 627/1229), which
recounts the initiatory voyage of a group of birds through seven valleys to
the palace of the mythical king-bird Simurgh, symbol of the Divine,
enthroned atop the cosmic mountain Qaf.

In addition to the book currently under review, `Attar’s masterpiece
inspired other renditions into English, including an abbreviated and freely
reworked edition by Edward FitzGerald, The Bird-parliament (1903); R. P.
Masani’s prose translation of half the original poem’s 4,600 lines, The
Conference of the Birds (1924); the incomplete prose version by C. S. Nott,
The Conference of the Birds (1954), which was prepared from Garcin de
Tassy’s nineteenth-century French translation, Le Langage des oiseaux, and,
as such, is obscured by an intervening third language; Afkham Darbandi and
Dick Davis’ Penguin Classics edition The Conference of the Birds (1984),
which represents the poem’s first complete English translation (minus the
invocation and epilogue), is based on the oldest extant manuscripts, and is
skillfully rendered into heroic couplets pleasingly faithful to the letter and
spirit of `Attar’s allegory; and Peter Avery’s determinedly literal translation,
The Speech of the Birds (1998), whose 560-page opus includes 120 pages of
enriching endnotes on ̀ Attar’s use of Qur’anic imagery and the hadith mate-



rial that offers students of Sufism an invaluable, albeit unpoetic, resource for
the literary expression of Islamic mystical concepts.

Abdulla’s contribution to this disparate corpus represents a decidedly
new approach to `Attar, one reminiscent of the modern refashionings of
Jalal al-Din Rumi. Much like modern poets who have popularized Rumi in
the West, Abdulla worked from an English translation, specifically Nott’s
paraphrase of de Tassy, and thereby avoided the rigor involved in consult-
ing manuscript copies or Sadiq Gauharin’s critical Persian edition of
Mantiq al-Tair (1991). Abdulla addresses this reliance in his introduction
(p. 11) and unreservedly directs readers seeking a scholarly treatment to
Avery’s translation.

To be fair, his endeavor is not a translation but a “new interpretation”
that, he hopes, “brings to life the spirit and the meaning of the original
work” (p. 10) to a western audience unversed in Persian’s or Sufism’s
technical language. The slender book (93 pages in all), though richly
illustrated with miniature paintings from the British Library, contains less
than half the original’s frame story and interjecting homilies.
Consequently, while we find descriptions of the birds and valleys as well
as the didactic stories of Sheikh San`an and Shibli, anecdotes on Hallaj’s
martyrdom and Mahmud’s longing for Ayaz are absent. There is no bibli-
ography, and the fourteen explanatory notes on such salient figures as
Khidr, Yusuf, Bayazid Bistami, and Sheikh Junaid span no more than
three pages. 

In light of his reliance on Nott’s paraphrase, Abdulla’s interpretations
might at first glance appear as versified echoes of a prose antecedent.
However, his keen sensitivity to mood and irony, doubtlessly honed through
his training as a screenwriter, lends a palpable inventiveness to his verses
that, paradoxically, stays true to the heart of `Attar’s message.

The original Mantiq al-Tair was written according to a mathnawi nar-
rative meter of rhyming couplets, which used lines of twenty-two syllables
with rhymes on the eleventh and twenty-second syllables. Rather than
replicating this convention with heroic couplets, Abdulla, somewhat incon-
sistently, applies an alternating rhyming scheme that occasionally severs
thoughts, leaving them pendulously at the line’s end. The following exam-
ple, drawn from the climactic encounter between the thirty birds and the
theophanic vision of the Simurgh, illustrates not only this point but, in com-
parison with my own attempt at a literal translation of the same couplets,
shows the near impossibility of faithfully reproducing `Attar’s puns and
juxtapositions with verses oriented to an English-speaking audience.

146 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 22:3



Book Reviews 147

Abdulla’s interpretation (p. 86):

From their telepathic flow they ask the King to show
Them the nature of being, how the many is the One.

The Simurgh replies: “I’m the mirror wherein my sun
Reflects those who look in, see their body and soul

Completely, so you shall see thirty birds reach their goal.”

Literal translation:

Without thinking (bi tafakkur) they remained in meditation (dar tafakkur).
Since they did not know anything on account

of the spiritual state of non-existence (hich hal),
Without speaking (bi zaban) they asked a question from that majestic presence.

They wished that this powerful secret (sirr) be unveiled (kashf);
They wanted we-ness (ma’i) and you-ness (tu’i) differentiated/unloosened (hall).

Without speaking (bi zaban) the answer came from that majestic presence:
“Because that sun-like majestic presence is a mirror,

Whoever comes sees himself in it/Him;
Soul and body (jan u tan) and hidden and manifest (jan u tan) are seen in it/Him.

Since you came to this place as thirty birds (si murgh = a pun on Simurgh),
Thirty in this mirror you appeared.”

Though Abdulla’s interpretation of the Mantiq al-Tair contains lacunae
and an inattention to the subtle ambiguities of Persian, which might preclude
its use in university-level courses on Islam, Sufism, or pre-modern literature
of the East, its sheer readability and overall fidelity to the fundamental theme
of finding one’s true self in the transcendent Self will convey – to a general
readership – an appealing hint as to what the vast treasury of Persian mysti-
cal poetry has to offer. 

Chad G. Lingwood
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations

University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada