Farid ud-Din Abu Hamid Muhammad bin Ibrahim Attar, a sufi poet from Persia, is popularly known as Fariduddin Attar. His magnum opus, Mantiq ul-Tair (The Conference of Birds) is a classic of Persian mystical poetry. Rumi considered Attar of Nishapur as his master and described Attar’s understanding of spirituality in the following words: “Attar travelled through all the seven cities of love/ While I am only at the bend of the first alley.”

Attar, as the name suggests, was an apothecary, a practitioner of the ancient knowledge of medicines (materia medica) before becoming a seeker of esoteric knowledge or sufi wisdom. The story goes like this: one day Attar is sitting at his shop and a dervish comes to the shop and starts looking at all the herbs, perfumes and concoctions on display. Attar asks the dervish to leave. The dervish says he can leave easily because he is not carrying any baggage. He asks Attar: “How do you plan to leave? You have so much baggage. Maybe you should think about your own problems.” This admonition of the dervish had a transformative influence on Attar. It made him leave all his worldly activities behind and look for spiritual knowledge.

The most important message of Fariduddin Attar’s The Conference of Birds is that all the sources of wisdom, enlightenment, eternal bliss, satori and nirvana are within the seeker. This reviewer has learnt all this by reading the wonderful poetic translation of Mantiq ul-Tair by Muhammad Saleem Sethi from Persian into Urdu. A flock of birds decide to seek the king of birds (simorgh) and go through various travails of a journey (spiritual quest) through seven valleys: seeking, love, wisdom, independence and indifference, oneness, wonderment, and poverty and death. By the time they reach their destination, only thirty birds are left. The phrase for thirty birds in Persion is si morgh and these thirty birds have been looking for the king of all birds (simorgh). In the end, the birds or the seekers realise that what they have been looking for was within their own beings all along. What a great insight. It reminds one of Jacques Lacan’s pronouncement: “the lack of the lack is the Real.” This is a radical insight. The entire human history of feeling guilt and lack is undone with this insight unless you are a writer hell bent on producing guilt and fond of liberally borrowing from great world literature and reducing such liberating insights. This is what Bano Qudsia did with her reworking of The Conference of Birds in her Raja Gidh (Vulture, the King), a book that translates the liberating message of Fariddudin Attar into a guilt-producing fable for the contemporary Urdu readers.

The most important message of Fariduddin Attar’s The Conference of Birds is that all the sources of wisdom, enlightenment, eternal bliss, satori, and nirvana are within the seeker. 

This is the real service Sethi has done his readers. Now the readers of Urdu have the chance to read Raja Gidh and Mantiq ul-Tair side by side and see for themselves what Zia-ul-Haq did to a very tolerant form of spirituality and culture by patronising a bunch of writers who inculcated subservience in their readers by creating pseudo-profound conspiratorial forms of non-knowledge.

We should thank the publisher and the translator for making this masterpiece of world literature accessible to contemporary Urdu readers. It is a bilingual edition: the reader encounters the original Persian couplet first, then a poetic rendering in Urdu, and then a straightforward and easy-to-understand prose explanation. The third element (the prose explanation) is not available for all the couplets but the book makes the poem very accessible even for those who do not understand Persian.

As a reviewer, I would like to highlight the fact that Sethi decided to translate this classic of world literature into Urdu not because of any professional compulsion. He is a retired bureaucrat who decided to follow the family tradition of reading and translating Persian classics. His father, Younas Sethi, had earlier translated and published a poetic rendering of Rumi into Urdu. Younas Sethi’s Nawaa-i Nai (Song of the Reed) has also been sung by Tina Sani for Coke Studio Season 3. After his father had popularised Rumi, Saleem Sethi decided to translate Rumi’s master Fariduddin Attar into Urdu. The result is something that should be able to teach academics something valuable: the love of the craft and the independent pursuit of a personal project out of sheer love so that one can give meaning to one’s existence through one’s artistic performance. This is what academics in literature and translation departments should be doing instead of being busy with the co-authorship of vainglory. Sethi deserves much respect and accolades for what he has produced. It is indeed the result of a labour of love. The readers will be able to feel this love when they read the book. The publisher has also treated this book as an object that is the result of the translator’s passionate pursuit. The book meets the best standards of printing and binding and should be in the library of every thinking person in Pakistan who loves world literature. It is time to move away from the guilt-producing pseudo-sufis and to read the real thing.

Mantiq ul-Tair

Author: Fariddudin Attar, translated by Muhammad Saleem Sethi

Publisher: Sang-e-Meel Publications, Lahore

Pages: 546

Price: Rs 2,000

The reviewer teaches literature and critical theory at the University of Lahore. He can be reached at saeed@saeedurrehman.com