The Conference of the Birds, Farid Ud-Din Attar

The Conference of the Birds, Farid Ud-Din Attar

Translated with an introduction by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis

Attar's great mystical poem opens when all the birds of the world gather together to begin the search for an ideal king.

What follows is a marvellous allegorical rendering of sufism - the secretive and paradoxical form of Islamic mysticism. Like The Canterbury Tales, The Conference of the Birds consists of a group of stories bound together by a pilgrimage. The Way of the Sufi is expounded here in tales that are often riddling and sometimes obscure, but full of incident and suspense, laced with quick character sketches and witty vignettes of everyday life in twelfth-century Persia. Above all, though, the poem puts into words themes of love and the search for divine unity; in conveying these Attar has transformed belief into poetry, much in the same way that Milton or Dante did'.

The cover shows 'The Concourse of the Birds' from a manuscript of The Conference of the Birds, painted by Habib Allah. Reproduced by courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund

Details

• Paperback 
• ISBN: 9780140444346
• Condition: Very Good
  
• Publisher: Penguin Classics