Extracts from Attar’s Sufi Classic (Sacred Wisdom S.)

The “Conference of the Birds” is a 12th-century Sufi allegory that has been described as the Islamic “Canterbury Tales”. Written by an Iranian Sufi, Farid ud-Din Attar, who was a major influence on the work of Rumi, it is the story of the birds’ quest for an ideal king, and an allegory for the Sufi (or mystical Islamic) path to enlightenment. Though hugely popular and influential in the Islamic world, it is still relatively unfamiliar in the West. In this edition, the poet Raficq Abdulla has reinterpreted key extracts to make the insight of Sufism accessible to a contemporary reader. Each page is decorated with illustrations taken from Persian manuscripts in the Oriental collection at the British Library. The poem uses the birds’ journey to describe the stages of Sufi enlightenment, and each bird represents a human archetype. At the end of the tale, the birds discover tht what they are seeking is none other than themselves: in Sufism, enlightenment is unity with the Divine, and the way to God is inward, through one’s own soul.