'ART & SOUL
A mystic vision

In the works of the 12th century Sufi poet Farid ad-Din Attar, mysticism remains in balance 
with a storyteller’s art, writes B. N. Goswamy

Your face is neither infinite nor ephemeral.
You can never see your own face,
only a reflection, not the face itself.

It’s better to keep your breath cold.
Hold it, like a diver does in the ocean.
One slight movement, and the mirror image will be gone.

THE words are those of Farid ad-Din Attar, the great 12th century Sufi poet and philosopher. There was talk of him the other day when Muzaffar Ali, the filmmaker, was in town and speaking on Rumi, the celebrated mystic, on whom and whose work he has made, lately, an exquisitely mounted short film.

While Jalal-ud-Din Rumi is almost a household name — such is his fame, and so moving his poetry, full of "fire and honey" as it is, in one western critic’s words — Attar, for all his greatness, remains known to relatively fewer people. And yet he is the one whom Rumi acknowledged as one of his masters. "Attar roamed the seven cities of love: we are still just in one alley", he is believed to have said once.

The reference he was making was almost certainly to one of the great, mystery-laden works of Attar, the Mantiq al-Tayr, in which a host of birds fly across and pass through seven valleys in their search to find the great, mythical Simurgh: eternal like the phoenix and beautiful as the bird of paradise.

Not much is known about Attar’s life, and many details are hazily recorded. He is believed to have been born around 1142 AD in Nishapur in Iran — that is where he now lies buried — and as a young man worked, not too willingly, in the shop of his father who was a pharmacist. In his mind, Attar, — this is a pen name, meaning both a pharmacist and a perfumer — however, was never at rest, and a story is told about how he turned away from it all, after he had inherited his father’s flourishing business. One day an unsightly fakir, it is said, came to Attar’s shop and sat there, taking in the opulence of the store. Irked by his unfriendly gaze, Attar asked the fakir to leave. At which the fakir, looking him squarely in the eye, turned to him and said: "I have no difficulty in leaving, for this — pointing to his ragged cloak — is all I have. But you, who possess all this, how are you preparing yourself to leave all this?" Attar was greatly affected by this remark. He pondered over his life for many days, and at the end decided to give everything up. He joined the circle of a great teacher of a Sufi order, and took up a life of unburdened travel and exploration, much like the wandering fakir whose remark had moved him. From then on, his life consisted of meetings with holy men, experiencing life in the khanqahs, learning about the tariqah of the Sufis. And of writing. Everything had changed.

Of the numerous works that are attributed to Attar — opinions vary on this matter — the most celebrated perhaps is his Mantiq al-Tayr, "A Conference of the Birds", on which Peter Brook based a great theatrical production in the 1970s which he took first to the wilds of Africa and later to rapturous audiences in New York and Paris. The book, all in verse, is an astonishing work, filled with great truths that can enter the heart through undiscovered interstices. On the surface, it is the story of a journey that a group of birds sets out on, but in its essence an allegory of how a Sufi master can lead his followers towards enlightenment. The birds, in their burning desire to know the great Simurgh and see his abode, start flying towards his land, with the wise hoopoe as their head. A great many begin the journey, each with a secret longing of his own: the nightingale who is looking for his beloved, the parrot seeking the secret of immortality, the peacock representing the ‘fallen soul’, and so on. Along the way, however, many drop out, for they must cross as many as seven valleys: the valleys of Quest and Love, of Understanding and Detachment, of Astonishment and Deprivation and Death. Only 30 birds reach their destination but there, where they expected to find the great Simurgh, they find nothing. And then the hoopoe reveals to them, using a brilliant pun, that the Simurgh is nothing else than they themselves: Si meaning ‘thirty’ in Persian, and Murgh meaning ‘bird’. What they needed was a realisation of the Self. God, the Sufi doctrine says, is within us. It is not outside, or separate.

But then, in a wonderful dramatic image that the poet conjures up, in that moment of self-realisation, the sky was filled with shimmering light everywhere, like some cosmic mirror descending from on high, and into that all the birds dived and disappeared. Fana’a, the ultimate dissolution. Oblivion.

Farid ad-Din Attar wrote many other works, many of them greatly celebrated throughout the Islamic world: the Asrar Nameh, or the Book of Secrets, for instance; the Ilahi Nameh, or the Divine Book; the Tadhkirat al-Awliyah or Accounts of the Saints. But in nearly all of them mysticism remains in perfect balance with a great storyteller’s art. Even in the Mantiq al-Tayr, there are plots and sub-plots, for the hoopoe keeps telling his followers tales of all kinds even as they keep journeying through difficult terrains of mind and body. But in each of them is hidden a secret, a lesson.

The great mystic died at the age of over 70, but, sadly, his end is said to have been violent. For the Mongols had invaded Nishapur in 1221.

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