The Conference of the Birds
Farid Un-Din Attar, born in Neishapour, was a Persian mytic poet. His most famous work was The Conference of the Birds, an epic poem about, as the name would imply, bird. The story is an extended allegory about “the search for an ideal, spiritual king” (9). In it, the bird represent different types of humans, all on the quest to understand the divine, and traverse the stages of Sufism. The birds are led on by their spiritual leader, the hoopoe / the sheik, overcoming their fears and fatigue to ultimately reach the goal of the Simorgh. Attar’s poem then, is about the “stages encountered by the adept of the sufi’s Way”(14).
Ultimately, what the poem, and the birds, discover is that the thing for which they look, the Simorgh, lies within themselves (litereally, in Persian the Simorgh are the thirty birds). The hoopoe notes “you came as thirty birds and therefore saw/ these selfsame thirty birds, not less nor more;/ if you had come as forty, fifty – here/ an answering forty, fifty, would appear;/ Though you have struggled, wandered, travelled far,/ It is yourselves you see and what you are.”(219).
This piece draws on that last idea – that the thirty birds are in some ways the divine. The picture takes all the birds mentioned in the poem, and then adds some others to make there be a total of thirty birds. The birds are all flying, on a journey, but they are arranged to spell out Allah, visualizing the idea that they are themselves divine in some way, and that the journey has led them to a better understanding of themselves. At the top right of the picture, the top of the alif, is the hoopoe, the spiritual leader of the birds. He is put at the top right to symbolize his leadership of the flock.
In sum, this post hopes to visualize Attar’s poem.
It has the following birds in the picture:
- falcon,
- franconlin,
- hoopoe,
- nightengale,
- partridge,
- parrot
- cock pheasant
- pigeon,
- turtle dove,
- hawk
- duck
- homa
- heron
- owl
- finch
- quetzal
- trogon
- loon
- bluebird
- bluejay
- cardinal
- eagle
- banana quit
- gouldian finch
- purple finch
- mallard
- blue footed booby
- puffin
- golden eagle
- hummingbird