The Conference of the Birds by Attar: The Sufi Journey to the Self

The Poem

The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq ut-Tayr, literally "The Speech of the Birds") was composed around 1177 CE by the Persian Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar. At approximately 4,500 couplets, it is one of the longest and most elaborate allegorical poems in world literature, and it is widely considered the supreme poetic expression of the Sufi path.

The poem's frame is deceptively simple: the birds of the world gather to choose a king. The hoopoe, the wisest among them, announces that they already have a king, the Simurgh, a mythical bird of incomparable beauty and power who dwells on Mount Qaf, the mountain at the edge of the world. The birds must journey to Mount Qaf to find their sovereign. Most of the poem consists of the birds' objections (each bird has a reason not to go), the hoopoe's responses (each objection is answered with stories and arguments), and the journey through seven valleys of progressive spiritual purification.

Of the thousands who set out, only thirty birds survive to reach the Simurgh's court. And there they discover the poem's central revelation: the Simurgh is them. The Persian word "simurgh" can be read as "si murgh," which means "thirty birds." The king they sought was their own collective essence, purified by the journey. They are what they sought. The seeker is the sought. The drop is the ocean.

Who Was Attar?

Farid ud-Din Attar (c. 1145-1221) was born in Nishapur, in present-day northeastern Iran. His pen name, "Attar," means "pharmacist" or "perfumer," and he may have worked as a pharmacist in Nishapur (though some scholars question this biographical tradition). He was a prolific writer, producing at least thirty works of poetry and prose, including The Conference of the Birds, The Book of God (Ilahi-nama), and The Memorial of the Saints (Tazkirat al-Awliya).

Attar's poetry is characterized by its narrative skill, its emotional intensity, and its systematic treatment of the Sufi path. Where other Sufi poets (particularly Rumi) excel in lyric ecstasy, Attar excels in narrative structure: he can sustain an allegorical framework across thousands of lines while embedding hundreds of shorter stories within it, each perfectly placed to illuminate the current stage of the journey.

Attar is reported to have been killed during the Mongol invasion of Nishapur in 1221, though the details are uncertain. His death, if the tradition is accurate, means he died at approximately the same time his poetic heir, Rumi, was born (1207), creating the impression of a direct spiritual succession.

Rumi himself honoured this impression. He reportedly said: "Attar has traversed the seven cities of love; we are still at the turn of one street." This extraordinary tribute from one of the greatest poets in history gives some measure of Attar's standing within the Sufi tradition.

The Assembly of Birds

The poem opens with the birds of the world gathering for a conference. The hoopoe, who in Islamic tradition served as King Solomon's messenger (Quran 27:20-28), announces that they have a sovereign, the Simurgh, but they have forgotten him. The Simurgh dwells on Mount Qaf, beyond the seven valleys, and the birds must undertake the journey to find him.

The hoopoe functions as the Sufi sheikh: the spiritual guide who knows the path from personal experience and can answer every objection the seekers raise. The hoopoe does not force the birds to go. He cannot. The journey must be voluntary. But he can remove the excuses that prevent them from setting out, and this is the purpose of the first section of the poem: a systematic demolition of the arguments against the spiritual quest.

The Birds' Excuses: A Catalogue of Human Attachment

Each bird that refuses the journey represents a specific human attachment that prevents spiritual progress:

The hoopoe answers each bird with stories, arguments, and examples that expose the emptiness of the excuse. The nightingale's love for the rose is beautiful but finite: the rose withers. The hawk's proximity to the king is servitude, not freedom. The owl's treasure is worthless: you cannot take gold into the grave. Each excuse, however reasonable it sounds, is a disguise for the real obstacle: the fear of annihilation, the terror of losing the self that the journey to the Simurgh demands.

The Seven Valleys

The birds who accept the journey must pass through seven valleys, each representing a stage of spiritual purification. The valleys are not geographical locations but states of consciousness, and the journey through them is the Sufi path (tariqa) from the human to the divine.

1. The Valley of the Quest (Talab)

The first valley demands the desire for truth: the burning need to know the divine that motivates the seeker to leave everything familiar behind. Without genuine longing, the journey cannot begin. The Quest is not intellectual curiosity but existential hunger: the soul that has tasted the possibility of the divine and can no longer be satisfied with anything less.

2. The Valley of Love (Ishq)

The second valley demands the surrender of reason to passion. Love, in the Sufi sense, is not mere affection but a consuming fire that burns away the seeker's attachment to rational control. The lover does not calculate risks, weigh costs, or plan outcomes. The lover loves, and everything that is not love falls away. This valley is terrifying to the intellectual (the hawk, the owl) and exhilarating to the passionate (the nightingale).

3. The Valley of Knowledge (Ma'rifat)

The third valley grants direct perception: the seeker begins to see reality as it actually is, without the distortions of ego, desire, or fear. Knowledge here is not information but gnosis: the immediate, unmediated awareness of the divine presence in all things. Each seeker's knowledge is individual, suited to their capacity, like water filling vessels of different shapes.

4. The Valley of Detachment (Istighna)

The fourth valley demands the release of all attachments, including the attachment to spiritual experience itself. The seeker who has tasted divine knowledge must now let go of even that: the desire for mystical states, the pride of being a seeker, the identity of "one who knows." Detachment is not indifference but freedom: the soul that is attached to nothing can receive everything.

5. The Valley of Unity (Tawhid)

The fifth valley reveals the oneness of all existence. The seeker perceives that all beings, all events, all conditions are expressions of a single divine reality. Multiplicity does not disappear (the world still appears as many things) but it is seen through: beneath the many, the One is visible. This is the Sufi experience of tawhid (unity), the core of Islamic theology experienced as direct perception rather than doctrinal belief.

6. The Valley of Bewilderment (Hayrat)

The sixth valley is paradoxical: having perceived unity, the seeker is overwhelmed by the immensity of what has been perceived. All certainties dissolve. The seeker does not know whether they are the seeker or the sought, the lover or the beloved, the self or God. This is not confusion but the highest form of knowledge: the recognition that the divine reality exceeds all categories, including the category of unity itself.

7. The Valley of Poverty and Annihilation (Faqr wa Fana)

The seventh valley is the end of the journey and the end of the traveller. Poverty (faqr) means the complete emptying of the self: no possessions, no identity, no will, no existence separate from God. Annihilation (fana) is the extinction of the ego in the divine reality. What remains after fana is not nothing but everything: the divine presence that was always there, now perceived without the obstruction of the separate self.

The Teaching Stories

Embedded within the journey narrative are hundreds of short stories, parables, and anecdotes that Attar uses to illustrate the spiritual principles of each valley. These stories are drawn from Sufi tradition, Islamic history, Persian folklore, and Attar's own imagination. They are among the poem's greatest literary achievements: compressed narratives that combine wisdom, humour, pathos, and surprise in a few lines or a few pages.

Examples include:

• A king who falls in love with a slave girl and must choose between his kingdom and his love (Valley of Love)
• A Sufi who is asked "Where is God?" and answers "Where is He not?" (Valley of Unity)
• A man who searches the entire world for a treasure and finds it buried under his own house (the Simurgh revelation in miniature)
• A moth that flies into a candle flame and is consumed, becoming flame itself (fana)

The moth-and-candle story is the most famous of Attar's tales and the most concise expression of fana. The moth does not merely approach the flame, admire the flame, or warm itself by the flame. The moth enters the flame and is consumed. Only the moth that is consumed can truthfully say "I know what fire is," because knowing fire means becoming fire. This is the Sufi path: not the observation of the divine from a safe distance but the complete immersion of the self in the divine, even at the cost of the self.

The Simurgh Revelation

The poem's climax is one of the most celebrated passages in world literature. Of the thousands of birds who set out, only thirty survive the journey through the seven valleys. They arrive at the Simurgh's court, exhausted, transformed, stripped of everything they once were. They ask to see the Simurgh.

A curtain is drawn back, and what they see is a mirror. In the mirror, they see thirty birds. They are the Simurgh. The Simurgh is them.

The revelation works on multiple levels:

• Linguistic: "Simurgh" = "si murgh" = "thirty birds." The wordplay was there from the beginning, encoded in the name of the king they sought
• Philosophical: The divine is not external but internal. God is not "out there" on a distant mountain but "in here," in the purified consciousness of the seeker
• Mystical: The journey itself was the purification. The birds did not need to reach the Simurgh; they needed to become the Simurgh by shedding everything that prevented them from recognizing what they already were
• Paradoxical: The seeker is the sought. The lover is the beloved. The drop is the ocean. This is the Sufi paradox that language cannot resolve but experience can

Fana: The Death of the Self in God

The seventh valley, Poverty and Annihilation (Faqr wa Fana), is the Sufi term for the extinction of the individual ego in the divine reality. Fana is not destruction in the negative sense. It is the dissolution of the boundary between self and God, the drop returning to the ocean, the candle flame merging with the sun.

Attar distinguishes fana from mere death. Physical death destroys the body but leaves the ego intact (it continues in the afterlife, according to Islamic theology). Fana destroys the ego while the body continues. The person who has achieved fana walks, talks, and acts in the world, but the "I" that once drove their actions has been replaced by the divine will. They are God's instruments, not their own agents.

After fana comes baqa (subsistence): the return to ordinary consciousness with the ego permanently transformed. The person who has passed through fana and returned lives in the world but is no longer of the world. They act, but their actions arise from the divine will rather than from personal desire. This is the Sufi equivalent of the Zen concept of "no-mind" (mushin) and the Christian concept of "not I, but Christ in me" (Galatians 2:20).

Attar and Rumi

Attar and Rumi are the twin peaks of Sufi poetry, and their relationship defines the tradition. Attar (c. 1145-1221) was a generation older than Rumi (1207-1273). According to tradition, the young Rumi met the aged Attar during his family's flight from the Mongol invasion, and Attar recognized the boy's extraordinary spiritual potential.

Rumi's tribute to Attar ("He has traversed the seven cities of love; we are still at the turn of one street") is not merely polite praise. It reflects a genuine difference in approach. Attar is systematic where Rumi is ecstatic. Attar constructs elaborate allegorical frameworks (the seven valleys, the birds' journey) where Rumi erupts in lyric intensity. Attar is the architect of the Sufi path; Rumi is its singer.

The Conference of the Birds and Rumi's Masnavi (The Spiritual Couplets) are often studied together as the two essential Sufi poems. The Conference provides the map; the Masnavi provides the experience of the territory. Read the Conference first to understand the structure of the path, then read the Masnavi to feel what it is like to walk it.

The Hermetic Parallel

The Conference of the Birds's structure parallels the Hermetic path in several striking ways:

• The journey from multiplicity to unity mirrors the Neoplatonic return from the Many to the One
• The seven valleys correspond to the seven planetary spheres the soul passes through in the Hermetic ascent
• The Simurgh revelation ("you are what you seek") echoes the Hermetic gnosis: the divine mind (nous) within the human being is identical with the divine mind of the cosmos
• The hoopoe as guide corresponds to Hermes as psychopomp: the figure who leads the soul through the underworld of transformation
• The teaching stories function like the Hermetic dialogue (the Poimandres, the Asclepius): narratives that communicate initiatory knowledge through the relationship between teacher and student

Who Should Read It

Anyone interested in Sufi mysticism who wants the tradition's supreme literary achievement. The Conference of the Birds is to Sufism what the Divine Comedy is to Christianity: the definitive poetic map of the spiritual journey.

Readers of Rumi who want to understand the tradition Rumi emerged from. Attar is Rumi's acknowledged master, and the Conference provides the systematic framework that Rumi's lyric poetry assumes.

Students of comparative mysticism who want to see the parallels between Sufi, Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and Hindu traditions. The seven valleys correspond to the seven planetary spheres (Hermeticism), the seven chakras (Hinduism), and the seven terraces of Purgatory (Dante). The Simurgh revelation corresponds to the Upanishadic tat tvam asi ("thou art that") and the Hermetic gnosis.

Anyone going through a spiritual crisis who needs a reminder that the journey is the destination and the seeker is the sought.

Where to Buy

Buy The Conference of the Birds (Penguin Classics) on Amazon

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