It was only a matter of time before my fondness for great Sufi songs, performance clips, and film clips would lead me to delve into books of translations of classic Sufi poetry. In addition to the aforementioned film and music clips – mostly Hindi, Urdu, or Punjabi clips from India and Pakistan – I happened upon an excellent YouTube Channel, Let’s Talk Religion, which is run by a Swedish musician and scholar named Filip Holm, who has formally studied Sufism, though he also has cultural origins in a Christian family from Iraq. By watching this fascinating channel for the past year (but especially during the past few months), I have learned a lot more about the mostly Persian, though sometimes Arabic, roots of Sufi thought. But the final catalyst that led me to take a plunge into those books of poetry was the discovery of a corner within a Midtown (40th Street) branch of the New York Public Library (officially known as the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library), where I found poetry books translated from Persian, Arabic, Urdu, and Punjabi, dating from the twelfth century right up to the present (more or less), all crammed into one wonderful shelf filed according to call numbers beginning with 891 or 892. And since I was so inspired by this excursion into so much wonderful poetry, I decided to make this the basis of a new dimension of my blog.
Specifically, I am going to be writing about Sufi poetry, poetry at least somewhat inspired by the Sufi tradition, and related thoughts and philosophy. I have actually written rough sketches of writeups for a few of those books already (covering Rumi, Ibn Arabi, and Bulleh Shah), but for the sake of brevity – as well as better and (hopefully) more frequent blogging – in each post that I write here, I am going to focus on only one book – or, at most, a few books by one writer.
For a variety of reasons (which will become more clear a little later in the post), I am going to start with a twelfth century Persian classic, The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar (as translated into English by Afkhan Darbandi and Dick Davis). Attar was one of the greatest Sufi writers – actually a major influence on the most famous Sufi writer, Rumi – and his Conference of the Birds is considered a Sufi masterpiece. I first became curious about this work when it was mentioned in Let’s Talk Religion. I don’t think I actually saw the whole superbly detailed episode about it until well after I read it, but I know that I had seen it mentioned at least to such an extent that when I glimpsed this book on the shelf, I had to grab it – and, needless to say, I am very glad that I did. Even before I completely finished this remarkable book, I felt that I had to share my impressions of it somewhere, so I dashed off a few paragraphs on Facebook, which I have also decided to share here (with just a few words changed in editing):
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This epic poem revolves around a journey of many birds yearning to find a “king” – which actually means that they want to find a god… They are gathered together and led by a hoopoe to go on a long journey to find the Simorgh, the mythical bird who is obviously the great divine leader whom they will be able to look to for ultimate guidance and meaning, truth, revelation, etc. The long poem consists of parts that tell directly about the trials that the birds go through on their journey interspersed with parts that relate myths and legends about people. All of it is full of fantastic allegory and beautiful descriptions of very extreme experiences often consisting of fatal love and terrible suffering, which frequently return to a theme that to go forward on the necessary journey to spiritual enlightenment, people have to let go of their egos and vanity, their petty concerns, and material attachments.
The long journey starts out with thousands of birds, but so many perish along the way – having to go through valleys of extreme experience with names like Valley of Love, Valley of Bewilderment, and Valley of Poverty and Nothingness – that by the time they get to the Simorgh, there are only thirty left. And now I’m going to give the spoiler… Actually, it was kind of spoiled for me too, because anybody who looks up this classic and reads about it a little is going to learn about the ending too. But though I expected it, it was still great reading it here. And that ending is: When they finally get a chance to look at the Simorgh – the god that they have been searching for so long – they see a reflection of themselves.
That’s the essence of the end of their journey, though there is a lot of very impressive verbiage about spiritual ideas (that’s the best way I can describe it anyway) and it feels very otherworldly and hallucinatory. There are also a couple of more people-centered tales left in the poem that I need to get to, but I just wanted to write a little something about this poem once I got to the end of the great mystery. Though I don’t even know if this description is completely doing it justice, because, to put it in the simplest terms, this book is quite something!
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And now, for this blog post, I would like to expound a little upon the final revelation that I mentioned above… This is actually a beautiful reference to the concept that can be described to a great degree as pantheism, the idea that God can be seen/found in each one of us, because we are all part of God. But the Sufi-Muslim concept of God referred to in The Conference of the Birds is probably best described as panentheism, which means that while God can be seen in everything and we are all part of God (or at least part of a manifestation of God – it can get a bit complicated, depending…), God is also something that extends beyond all of us. (By the way, another twelfth century Sufi, the Arabic/Andalusian poet and philosopher named Ibn Arabi, is known for spelling out a very detailed version of the panentheist idea. I hope to include some details about his works in another post.)
Another essential feature of these Sufi works is the idea that in order to see God as God is shown in all of us – and also, possibly, beyond what we see in all of us – one needs to take a significant spiritual journey. This great journey is something that essentially has to be taken inward, although it is metaphorically described in The Conference of the Birds as a trip across a vast distance.
Now, I did not intend to quote much from The Conference of the Birds, because the main purpose of my short writeup of this narrative poem was not to talk too much about the excellent poetic language (which would probably double or triple the size of this post) but to convey the interesting story and fascinating ideas. So, I did not think it was a problem that I had returned it to the library. But while writing this post, I thought that it might be a good idea to give a sample of the language used in the climactic scene when the Simorgh is revealed, because it shows just how skillfully and vividly Ud-din Attar conveyed the panentheist spiritual concept – as well as the concept of a spiritual journey – at the heart of his work. Thankfully, Filip Holm quoted the exact right passage toward the end of his episode at Let’s Talk Religion (using the same translation, too). I am not going to copy the entire passage that he quoted, but I am happy to include an excerpt here:
Though you have struggled, wandered, traveled far, It is yourselves you see and what you are. (Who sees the Lord? It is himself each sees; What ant’s sight could discern the Pleiades? What anvil could be lifted by an ant? Or could a fly subdue an elephant?) How much you thought you knew and saw; but you Now know that all you trusted was untrue. Though you traversed the valley’s depths and fought With all the dangers that the journey brought, The journey was in Me, the ideas were Mine – You slept secure in Being’s inmost shrine. And since you came as thirty birds, you see These thirty birds when you discover Me, The Simorgh…
I should add here that those last couple of lines spell out a certain play on words in Persian that obviously is not evident in the translation into English. (Of course I do not know Persian, but I can tell you this because I learned about it from Let’s Talk Religion and a few other sources.) In Persian, “si” means thirty and “morgh” means birds, so the word “Simorgh” actually designates thirty birds.
Apparently, The Conference of the Birds contains a lot of wordplay that cannot come through in an English translation. But even seen in English (and through, I gather, one of the best translations to be found), the vividness of the writing helps to make this poem a wonderful read – whether or not you have a strong interest in, or believe in, the spiritual premises. And that is another reason (along with the spiritual ideas – which do greatly interest me – and the intricately narrative nature of the poem) that I felt inspired to write about it first among a great batch of Sufi books.
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P.S. I suppose that if I am going to get into works related to a spiritual/religious tradition, I should add a few words – for anyone who might be curious – regarding my own background and beliefs.
By background, I am ethnically Jewish, although I have almost no education in the religion, having come from parents who, themselves, were (for various reasons) not that interested in Judaism or even maintaining the Jewish traditions. (Meanwhile, living in New York City for most of my life, I got to be exposed to a whole hodgepodge of different groups and traditions, something that I feel grateful about.)
When I was young, I was an atheist, but for a long time after that, I felt more comfortable calling myself an agnostic. Then, in very recent times, I have felt the pull of certain spiritual ideas… I wondered for a while if I might be a pantheist, but, actually, I have become most interested in the idea of being – maybe you have guessed it – a panentheist. I became very attracted to Sufism, but I think that music and dance had a lot to do with that – not to mention poetry.
I’ll stop there… I’ll just add, as a final word, that thinking and writing about religious or spiritual ideas is a pretty new thing for me. I think that may be one reason why I am so interested right now in doing just that.