The Conference of the Birds

The spine passes the subtractive test. Remove the excuses and the journey has no cost, since each bird names one attachment the Way must strip: the nightingale’s rose, the parrot’s longing for the water of life, the peacock’s lost paradise, the duck’s water, the partridge’s jewels, the humā’s royal shadow, the hawk’s place on the king’s wrist, the owl’s treasure in the ruins, the finch’s plea of weakness. Remove the valleys and the end is unearned; remove Shaykh Ṣanʿān and the poem loses its proof that the Way can cost faith itself. What holds the axis here, the lowest of the twelve, is the middle: the questions put to the hoopoe are answered by stacked anecdotes, several to a question, and some could be lost or exchanged without loss. The compression of the Persian couplet is beyond this reading, and is not charged.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds without the doctrine: what the seeker seeks is not elsewhere, and the self that arrives is not the self that set out. The thirty birds look at the Sīmurgh and see themselves. Beside it the poem lays open the anatomy of evasion. Every excuse a bird offers is a good reason, a beloved, a vocation, a piety, a modesty, and the poem shows each as the self defending its size. Shaykh Ṣanʿān discloses that a holy man’s attachment to his own holiness is an attachment like any other, and the holy fools who rebuke God disclose a faith that includes complaint. Held below the top because much of the teaching is the Sufi path as it already stood, stated rather than found, and because the answers sometimes close what the stories leave open.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Height is reached repeatedly and at the right places. Shaykh Ṣanʿān at the Christian girl’s door, the old master with his disciples watching him burn what he had taught, then herding swine, is dreadful and absurd at once. The valleys rise by stages, and the later ones, bewilderment and annihilation, are the summit of the poem. The arrival is the height: of the multitude only thirty come, broken and burnt, are rebuffed at the threshold, and are then shown the king, who is themselves. Held below the top because the middle runs long on a level didactic plane, and the axis counts frequency as well as height: the heights crowd the frame’s two ends, and come less often between.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Myth built, and built to the last word. The quest to a hidden king beyond a world-mountain is the oldest pattern, and the poem makes it carry its meaning structurally: the destination is a mirror, so the journey is the transformation and nothing but it. The Sīmurgh is inherited from Iranian myth, the bird of the Shahnameh that raises Zāl, so the archetype is not invented but turned: the royal bird of the epic becomes the divine reality. The hoopoe is Solomon’s messenger to Sheba in the twenty-seventh sura of the Qurʾān, so the guide comes with scriptural warrant. Each bird is a bird, with its habit and plumage, and a human type at once. The pun of sī murgh, thirty birds, on Sīmurgh puts the whole myth in one word.

Score: 9.5 / 10

The inheritance is plain: the Arabic prose allegories of the birds’ journey to a king, Avicenna’s and the Risālat al-ṭayr ascribed to a Ghazālī (whether Abū Ḥāmid or his brother Aḥmad is debated), and Sanāʾī’s Ḥadīqat al-ḥaqīqa, the first great Sufi masnavī of anecdote and teaching. The turn is double. It joins the two, setting the anecdotal teaching inside a narrative quest, so that the stories become stations on a road; and it ends not in admission to an Other but in identity, the thirty birds as the king. That ending is a theological wager as well as a formal one. The stake shows in Ṣanʿān, a great shaykh who renounces Islam for love and is not condemned, and in the holy fools’ reproaches to God, material a jurist could call heresy. Held below the top because the form and most of the doctrine were inherited, and the turn perfects more than it breaks.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes, at the frame. Told as a treatise, the teaching that the seeker is the sought would be a proposition; told as a journey of many birds who dwindle to thirty, it is an experience the reader undergoes, and the number is the meaning, since only a remnant can arrive and the remnant’s number is the king’s name. The bird is the instrument: a soul with wings and a habit, so that the excuses are speech in character. The anecdote is the instrument of the middle, each question answered by a story, so that the poem teaches as a master teaches, by example. Held off the top because the middle’s form is a container more than an instrument: the chain of question and story could run for fewer stations or more and say what it says.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: eight and a half centuries of reading, copying, commentary and imitation in Persian, Turkish, Chagatai and Urdu, and a century and a half of translation into European languages. The poem keeps its questions open. Is the identity at the end the soul’s discovery of God within, or its annihilation into God, the shadow lost in the sun? Is Ṣanʿān’s fall a sin forgiven, or a station on the Way that only the fall could reach? Is the hoopoe’s authority the poet’s, the master’s or the Prophet’s? The form yields depth too: the excuses return, transformed, in the valleys. Held below the top because the anecdotal middle yields less on return than the frame, and many readers return to the frame and to Ṣanʿān alone.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The field is Persian poetry of the twelfth century and, within it, the Sufi didactic masnavī, then barely two generations old. Its intrinsic force: the poem made the mystical masnavī a narrative of the soul’s journey, with a single plot and an ending that is its argument, which Sanāʾī’s anthology of teaching had not been. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Rumi, by every account, revered ʿAṭṭār and built his Masnavī in the same metre and the same method of tale and gloss; Jāmī and the Timurid poets drew on it; Navāʾī answered it in Chagatai with his Lisān al-ṭayr (1499); it was adapted in Turkish, and copied in illustrated manuscripts; in Europe came Garcin de Tassy (1863), FitzGerald, and the stage version of Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière (1979). Held below the top because in its own tradition Rumi’s Masnavī outgrew it.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over some eight hundred and fifty years. Form: the text survives whole, in many manuscripts, with the ordinary variance of a much-copied Persian poem and no loss of any part that carried its meaning; nothing is recovered or fragmentary. Presence: continuous across the Persianate world since its composition, copied, illustrated, recited and taught through Iran, Central Asia, Anatolia and India; in Europe since the nineteenth century, and now widely read in English. Fabric: manuscript variance only. This is the step for centuries, the text whole and read without break. Held below the top of that step because its presence outside the Persianate languages is about a century and a half old, because even within them it has been read in the shadow of Rumi, and because a survival of centuries does not stand level with the millennia of Homer or Job.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Judged on the original as far as this reading reaches it. What can be judged is the making of the whole, and the frame is built with great economy: an assembly, a proposal, a run of excuses each in character, a crisis that thins the company, a graded road, an arrival, a single word that resolves it. The setting of Ṣanʿān, after the excuses and before the road, as the proof of what the road may cost, is a master’s stroke. The anecdotes are told plainly and briskly. Charged: the stacking of anecdotes in the answers, where the transitions turn formulaic, and a gloss that sometimes explains a story that had already done its work. The music of the Persian line as a native reader hears it is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the comic squabbles of the birds over their excuses, and the last valley, where the self is annihilated; or Ṣanʿān herding swine for a Christian girl, and the doxology’s praise of God. One law governs them: love dissolves the self, and every attachment, low or high, is measured by whether it yields. The beggar who loves a prince and the shaykh who loves a girl obey it; so does the hoopoe’s own authority, which ends at the threshold. The range is wide, court and bazaar, comic and scandalous, erotic and metaphysical, and it is held. Charged: the doxology’s polemic for the first four caliphs and against sectarian quarrel stands outside the poem’s law, and some answers apply the law mechanically.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Many orders, held by one allegory. The soul and its passions, in every bird. The sacred in its whole range: law, piety, scandal, gnosis, annihilation. Kingship and power, in the king the birds seek and in the kings, slaves and courtiers of the anecdotes. Love, profane and divine, and their confusion. Society: beggars, merchants, dervishes, shaykhs, madmen. Faith against faith, in Ṣanʿān’s Islam and the girl’s Christianity. Death, repeatedly. The natural order, in the birds, the mountain and the valleys. All of it is integrated, since all of it is the Way. Held at this mark because family, labour and history are present only as occasions for an example, and because every order is joined to the others by being made a figure of the one order, the soul’s road.

Score: 8.6 / 10