33 pages • 1 hour read
Farid ud-Din AttarThe Conference of the Birds
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | AdultA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 167-212Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 167-172 Summary
In the final question posed to the hoopoe, a bird asks how long the journey is to the Simorgh, and the hoopoe answers by describing the seven valleys of the Way. The hoopoe says that the distance of these valleys is unknown, because no one has returned. The hoopoe calls the valleys “seven stages” and names them: the Valley of the Quest, the Valley of Love, the Valley of Mystery and Insight, the Valley of Detachment and Serenity, the Valley of Unity, the Valley of Bewilderment, and, finally, the Valley of Poverty and Nothingness. He goes on to describe each of these valleys in detail and, like his replies to the birds’ individual questions, follow these descriptions with stories or fables.
The Valley of the Quest is the beginning of the journey. It is the place where the birds must renounce the power of Self, all worldly possessions, and the world. Physical and emotional possessions are cast off until nothing remains in the heart besides the quest itself. At the end of this stage, the bird will unlearn the difference between strength and blasphemy because “both vanish into strengthless vacancy” (167).
If the birds are not distracted or unable to endure hardship, as relayed in the stories accompanying the Valley of the Quest, the hoopoe says they will enter the Valley of Love. He describes the lover as frenzied, fevered, and burning for enlightenment. The lover is also one who does not know how to tell the difference between faith and blasphemy, doubt and certainty, and good and evil, but only burns beside them “as a living flame” (172). The hoopoe insists love can only exist when the birds rejects intellect and reason, because love itself is unreasonable. The birds can only continue down the “pilgrim’s path” when they “long to sacrifice life and heart” (173).
Pages 173-212 Summary
The next stage, the Valley of Insight into Mystery, is described by the hoopoe as different for everyone. He insists that there is not a single, uniform path to enlightenment for the birds to follow, adding, “no bird ever knows/The secret route by which another goes”(179). The hoopoe goes on to say that some followers might pray in mosques while others pray in “idols’ shrines” (180), but when they are illuminated by truth, all are welcome on the path to enlightenment.
The hoopoe next describes the Valley of Detachment, where “all lust for meaning disappears” (184). This valley is a place of pure desolation, where a “wintry tempest blows with boisterous haste” (184). The hoopoe goes on to say that 100,000 people have perished in this valley because they could not understand how “a tiny ant/Is here far stronger than an elephant” (185). The hoopoe then posits a long litany of types of loss and compares them to the miniscule: 1,000 men dying in this valley as though “one drop of dew absorbed within the sea”(185), and the nine planets ceasing their turning as “the sea has lost a single drop” (186).
The next valley described by the hoopoe is the Valley of Unity, which is lonely and austere. All who enter this valley merge into a single, “multifarious, thick swarm” (191). Rather than a uniform being, the hoopoe describes it has a “oneness of diversity” (191). In this valley there are no more numbers or units, including the unit of time, and only oblivion remains.
The next valley is the Valley of Bewilderment, which the hoopoe describes as “a place of pain and gnawing discontent” (196). The inhabitants of this valley long for death, and also unlearn the unity of the last valley, as the hoopoe cites, “your soul/Is scattered and knows nothing of the Whole” (196). This valley removes the last of identity and knowledge from the pilgrim, but leaves them with love. The hoopoe then quotes a pilgrim, who observes a paradox: his “heart is empty, yet with love is full”(197). This occurs once one has endured the hardships of bewilderment.
The final valley described by the hoopoe is the Valley of Poverty and Nothingness. Despite calling it a place that “words cannot express” (203), the hoopoe relays that it is a place where one turns “lame and deaf” and no longer possess a mind. He goes on to describe the worlds of light and shadow and says that this valley emerges from those two worlds as “a state the mind has never seen” (204). He tells the birds once more to put aside the Self and mount Boraq, the beast that the prophet Muhammad rode to heaven, to journey through space and time towards oblivion. He describes the process of reaching enlightenment as losing yourself then losing the loss of yourself, until there is no worldly trace left in you.
Pages 167-212 Analysis
The hoopoe’s descriptions of the Seven Valleys are a spatial representation of a spiritual and interior journey to enlightenment. Not much is known about the valleys because no one returns from the journey, and the hoopoe posits the question, “How can men tell you what they do not know?” (166). By the end of the section, it is understood that knowledge itself dissolves into oblivion and nothingness, beyond something that language can describe.
The structure of the previous sections is intact, though this section comprises a single question with a very long answer that comprises numerous stories in the context of the hoopoe’s description of each Valley, rather than in the context of a bird’s individual question. Each valley’s description questions reality, definition, or logic. The Valley of the Quest, for example, makes the pilgrim question the definitions of and difference between faith and blasphemy, which is integral to Sufism’s rejection of Islamic religious conventions. Through the stories associated with it, the Valley of the Quest also wants the reader to consider their perceptions of undergoing a spiritual journey. In the story “Shah Mahmoud and the sweeper,” a man perceives a shut door when in reality it is open: “Once someone cried to God: ‘Lord let me see/The door between us opened unto me!’/ And Rabe’eh said: ‘Fool to chatter so— / When has the door been closed, I’d like to know?’” (172). Rabe’eh was a female Islamic mystic who lived in the 8th century and she appears in this story to question ideas of access to God.
As always, key historical and religious concepts are found in obscure anecdotes. The doctrine of Sufism, for example, appears in an unlikely story in this section: the story of an Arab travelling in Persia who is robbed by bandits after becoming intoxicated (176-77). The Arab represents the formal, rigid interpretation of Islam that dominated medieval society and who is weighed down by his earthly possessions. The bandits represent followers of Sufism, who follow a renegade interpretation of Islam characterized by mysticism and poverty. The wine that makes the Arab drunk and enables the bandits to steal from him is the doctrine of Sufism, which strips away religious and social conventions and the importance of earthly belongings.
It is important to bring up that the process to enlightenment is not an accrual of knowledge, but a deconstruction of reality. The hoopoe’s descriptions of the quest not only ask its audience to question its knowledge to the journey, but question what it learned even in the prior valley. In the Valley of Bewilderment, for example, the hoopoe says the knowledge from the Valley of Unity is no longer applicable. The characteristics of the valleys question and contradict each other only to arrive at an all-encompassing and final nothingness.
