Introduction to ʿattar and 'Conference of the Birds'
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OUDCE: Conference of the Birds Michaelmas 2018 Week 1 I Overview ʿAttar is one of the great poets of the Islamic mystical tradition, who has been called ‘The Poet of the Men of God’. Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-ṭayr) is one of the most famous and influential poems in the whole Islamic poetic tradition – capturing the imagination not only of the artists of his time, but the novelty and vividness of the story of the group birds who set out to find their King has also drawn the attention of many western artists, as we shall see. He was born and lived for his whole life in Nishapur, in eastern Iran, and he wrote only in Persian. He was prolific poet who wrote four long mathanawī’s, including Conference, as well as a fine collection of qasīdas – or love poems dedicated to a divine or human beloved – and a collection of rubāʿāt – four line poems. He wrote one prose work for which he was perhaps even better known than for his poetry: The Memorials of the Saints (Tadhkirāt al-ʿawliyā’), which is an account of the life and sayings of previous Sufi masters. The name ʿAṭṭār is a pen-name; it means perfume, and it indicates that he was an apothecary and a doctor, running a business with a shop-front on one of the main streets in Nishapūr, which he had inherited from his father. He makes some references to his work, for instance, that he wrote two of his major poetic works whilst simultaneously treating 500 patients a day. We don’t know much about ʿAṭṭār’s spiritual life, and some people, such as the pioneering scholar of his work, Hellmut Ritter,1 have claimed that he was not even a Sufi in any formal sense. But more recent scholarship tends towards thinking that this cannot possibly be true, as it is felt that the poems could not have been written by someone who had not personally experienced the states they describe. It is now thought that he was intimately connected to the spiritual life of Nishapūr, which was a an important Sufi centre for seekers and adepts, to whose experience and aspiration ʿAṭṭār gave voice. One of the few statements he makes about his involvement is in the introduction to The Memorials of the Saints where he says; 1 Hellmut Ritter, Das Meer der Seele; Mensch, Welt und Gott in den Geschichten des Farīduddin ʿAṭṭār. Leiden, 1955. See also his entry in Encyclopaedia of Islam, II. 1 “From early childhood, seemingly without cause, I was drawn to this particular group (i.e. the Sufis), and my heart was tossed in waves of affection for them and their books were a constant source of delight for me”.2 The tradition is that he was converted to Sufism when one day a wandering dervish came into his shop and questioned him about his preparedness for the afterlife. The dervish then died suddenly in front of him; he was so disturbed by this that he abandoned his shop and went into retreat for several years at one of the many Sufi lodges in Nishapūr.3 However, ʿAttar is never presented as a Sufi master; as far as I know, there is no tradition of he himself doing wondrous deeds and uttering wise sayings to students. He was above all an extremely gifted poet. He was not on the whole a great structural innovator; his fame rests upon the beauty of his language, the power of his imagery and the depth of his perception. He wrote in Persian, not Arabic. This was a transitional time within the Islamic world as far as language was concerned. Arabic was the official language of the whole Empire; it was the language of the Quran and of religious law, and it was not allowed to translate these, as Arabic is regarded as a sacred a language. In the early centuries of the Islamic conquest, Arabic was also the main cultural language, and there was a conscious attempt to downgrade Persian, which was the language of the conquered Sassanid Empire, and had a threateningly long and sophisticated culture of its own which was very different from the Bedouin origins of the ruling Arabs. But by the 10th–11th century, Persian began to re-emerge in a new form – written in Arabic script – and specific forms of Persian art and literature began to develop, particularly poetry. The seminal work here was Firdowsi’s Shah Nameh (Book of Kings) which not only celebrated the unique history of the Persian-speaking peoples, but also revived the language rather, perhaps, in the way that we regard Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as seminal to the development of the English language. 2 See Lewisohn and Shackle ʿAṭṭār and the Persian Sufi Tradition, p. xviii 3 See Avery and Alizadeh Fifty Poems of Attar, re-press, Melbourne, 2007. 2 Important to the development was the specifically Persian poetic form of the rhyming couplet. Arabic verse is all mono-rhyme, meaning that every line of a poem ends with the same sound. This puts a severe limit upon the number of verses, such that Ibn al- Fāriḍ’s great mystical work Poem of the Way is regarded as an extraordinary achievement at about 700 lines. The rhyming couplet style – called mathnawi – released the poet from these constrictions and from this point onwards the Persian tradition started to produced epics. Shahnameh is nearly 50,000 couplets; Rūmi’s Mathnawi something like 24,000 altogether in six books. Conference of the Birds at about 4,500 verses is therefore a relatively modest length. By ʿAttar’s time, there was existing tradition of mystical poetry in Persian. Of particular importance was Sanai Ghaznavi (d. 1141) from the very far East, bordering onto Afghanistan, whose The Walled Garden of Truth is regarded as the first Persian work of mystical poetry and Niẓāmī Ganjvi (d.1209) from the area which is now Azerbaijan, who really established the mathnawi form, with five epic poems usually referred to as the Khamsa. The trend towards Persian trend was very much reinforced by the emergence of political regimes for whom Persian was the language of the court and administration. The Ghaznavids, who ruled in the far Eastern regions, moving into India, in the 10th/11th centuries; the Seljuks who, in various guises, took over the rulership of the whole of the central regions from 11th century until the Mongols displaced them. The trend continued after the Mongol conquests; all the Empires which emerged post conquest spoke Persian rather than Arabic – the Timurids, the Moghuls in India, the Safavids in central Iran. It was only later – 14th century – that these people began to develop culturally in their vernacular languages, that is, in Turkish or Urdu or Bengali. Up until that point they shared a common Persian heritage which included poems like Conference of the Birds, and it for this reason, as well of course its great accessibility, that this poem became extremely influential. Cultural Background Nishapur is about 1000 miles from Baghdad, which at that time was the centre of the Islamic world; there was still a Caliph there, with some remaining nominal power but enormous symbolic significance. But the distance did not mean that places like Nishapur were isolated or out on a limb. It was a huge Empire, containing many different political units, cultures, races and even religions, but there was nevertheless 3 a high degree of coherence across the whole region based on religious practice and universal knowledge of the Arabic language. People and information – news, but also ideas and books – travelled pretty fluently across the whole area. Not everyone travelled as much as the famous 14th century writer Ibn Batuta, who travelled from North African to China, but a great many people – particularly scholars – made the pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetimes, and often took several years to do it, taking the opportunity to visit people and places at the same time. Reading accounts of people’s lives, you could get the impression that Baghdad to Nishapur or Bukhara was just a short hop. Islamic intellectual life was in a state of brilliance during this time – one of its many phases of brilliance – and Nishapur, Damascus, Cairo and Baghdād, and also in the West, Seville/Cordaba, were important centres where philosophers, poets and writers, Quranic scholars and scientists would be meeting together in the city and in the courts. I mention science this was a great age when Islamic scientists were forging ahead with discoveries in astronomy and medicine in particular. So at the level of the intellegensia, it was a very sophisticated and literate culture; a recent piece of research into a private library in Damascus in this Ayyubid period showed that the collection owned by one minor aristocrat was larger and more comprehensive than any library at any of the universities in Paris or Rome at the time. Most important for our purposes, though, is the fact that Nishapur was a very important spiritual centre. It had been the home of some of the most famous Sufi masters: al-Sulamī (d. 1022), al-Qushayrī (d.1072) and Aḥmad al-Ghazālī (d. c1020) – regarded as the founder of the school of love mysticism, and in the previous generation Abu Saʿīd al-Khayr (d.1049) one of the earliest mystical poets to write in Persian. It was a place where there were many Sufi orders – many ‘lodges’ with numerous disciples studying and practicing. ʿAttar lived at a time of considerable upheaval and also transformation. Muhammad died in 632, so by this time the culture had been developing for 5-600 years and it had been a time of almost continual territorial expansion.