ATTAR OF NISHAPUR:
The Simorgh
from The Conference of the Birds (c. 1177)
by Farid ud-Din Attar
Translated by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (Penguin Classics, 1984)
Throughout the world men separately conceived / An image of its shape, and all believed / Their private fantasies uniquely true.
Passage:
It was in China, late one moonless night,
The Simorgh first appeared to human sight —
He let a feather float down through the air,
And rumours of its fame spread everywhere;
Throughout the world men separately conceived
An image of its shape, and all believed
Their private fantasies uniquely true.
If this same feather had not floated down,
The world would not be filled with His renown —
It is a sign of Him, and in each heart
There lies this feather's hidden counterpart.
They see the Simorgh — at themselves they stare,
And see a second Simorgh standing there;
They look at both and see the two are one,
That this is that, that this, the goal is won.
Biography & Abstract
Farid ud-Din Attar (c. 1145–1220) was a Persian Sufi poet born in Nishapur, in the northeast of present-day Iran. The Conference of the Birds — Mantiq ut-Tayr in Persian — was completed around 1177 CE: more than 4,500 lines of allegorical verse in which thirty birds journey across seven valleys to find the Simorgh, the mythical sovereign bird who dwells on the mountain at the edge of the world. Of the forty works bearing his name, approximately seven are verifiably his. This is the one that endured.
The poem's argument is not theological. It is about collective becoming. The birds set out seeking a king outside themselves. The thirty who survive arrive to discover, in the Simorgh's face, their own reflection. The name contains the answer: si means thirty in Persian; morgh means birds. The sovereign they sought was the collective itself, formed only by the ordeal of the journey undertaken together.
What the poem encodes is an argument about the nature of cultural communities: that what a group seeks is meaning, coherence, a reason to remain, and these cannot be conferred by any external authority. It exists latently in the assembled participants and becomes real only through shared movement. The feather that set the journey in motion was already present, hidden, in every heart. The infrastructure does not create the culture. It creates the conditions under which people discover that it was already there.
