The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq ut Tair) by the Persian
mystic poet Farid ud-din Attar is a long allegory describing the
philosophical beliefs and religious practices of the Sufi. It de-
picts the quest of myriad birds, endowed with human charac-
teristics, from their terrestrial condition to their final absorption
into the Simurgh--a metaphor for Allah, the supreme being or
God. During the stages of their difficult trajectory each of the
birds in this veritable comédie-humaine develops its own poten-
tial, but only thirty of them are destined to achieve their goal.
Hidden within Attar's lyrical work is the entire Sufi mystery
revealed in the seven levels of religious experience attained by
the birds. Also implicit in The Conference of the Birds is the psy-
chological process that takes the protagonists and the reader from
an ego-centered condition in the external world to annihilation
and reintegration into the Self: a dehumanizing process.

Similar in its theme of trials and pilgrimages to the thir- teenth-century French Romance of the Rose, Chaucer's fifteenth- century Canterbury Tales, and Novalis's nineteenth-century
Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Attar's work relates a religious and
psychological experience that permits the protagonists/initiates
to reach out beyond the world of contingencies and ego limita-
tions into a celestial sphere where feelings of wholeness and
completion are fully realized. Sufi mystical poetry, as found in
the works of Rūmī Attar, Sa'dī ( 1184- 1291), Hāfiz (c. 1325-
89), and Rūmī ( 1207-73), the founder of the whirling der-
vishes, may be interpreted according to the reader's level of il-
lumination or psychological awareness.

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