Texts of Islam

Bird Parliament: Bird Parliament

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This is an excerpt from *Bird Parliament* (*Mantiq al-Tayr*), a 12th-century Persian Sufi allegorical poem by Farid ud-Din Attar, rendered into English verse by Edward FitzGerald — the same translator known for the *Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam* — in a style that gives it the cadence and idiom of Victorian narrative poetry. The birds of the world convene to find themselves a king and are addressed by the Hoopoe (Tajidar), who declares that their true sovereign is the Simurgh, a divine bird dwelling on the mythic mountain Qaf, and that each bird must undertake an arduous, potentially lifelong pilgrimage to reach him. The poem's central mystical claim is that the Simurgh is not distant but already present with the birds at this very moment — their inability to perceive him is the consequence of self-imposed spiritual exile, which only the ordeal of the journey can undo. A series of birds — the Pheasant, the Nightingale besotted with the Rose, the Parrot satisfied with earthly sweetness — raise objections to the quest, and the Hoopoe refutes each with parables (a chance encounter between Shah Mahmud and a poor fisherman, a dervish humiliated by a beauty's indifferent smile) that illustrate how divine grace is unearnable and how attachment to worldly pleasures is self-delusion. The work operates simultaneously as a lively dramatic assembly and as a systematic Sufi allegory in which the birds' competing temperaments represent the soul's various evasions of the spiritual path, making it essential reading for anyone interested in Persian mystical literature or the Sufi tradition of the soul's quest for union with the divine.

Bird Parliament: Bird Parliament

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