Attar and Rumi

Some interesting facts for the Tuesday's book-club reading Attar's Conference of the Birds:

When the Mongols invaded Central Asia sometime between 1215 and 1220, Rumi's father (Bahauddin Walad) set out westwards with his whole family and a group of disciples. On the road to Anatolia, Rumi encountered one of the most famous mystic Persian poets, Attar, in the city of Nishapur, located in what is now the Iranian province of Khorasan. Attar immediately recognized Rumi's spiritual eminence. He saw the father walking ahead of the son and said, "Here comes a sea followed by an ocean." He gave the boy his Asrarnama, a book about the entanglement of the soul in the material world. This meeting had a deep impact on the eighteen-year-old Rumi's thoughts, which later on became the inspiration for Rumi's works.

One day, while Rumi and his favourite student, the famous Husam Chelebi, were wandering through the Meram vineyards outside of Konya when the later described an idea he had to Rumi: "If you were to write a book like the Ilahiname of Sanai or the Mantiq 'ut-Tayr (Conference of the Birds) of Attar it would become the companion of many troubadours. They would fill their hearts from your work and compose music to accompany it."

Rumi smiled and started immediately to write the first eighteen lines of his major work: The Mathnawi. Husam implored Rumi to write more. Rumi spent the next twelve years of his life in Anatolia dictating the six volumes of this masterwork, the Mathnawi to Husam.

Those first lines can be found in the opening of the Mathnawi, under the title: "Song of the Reed". I was blessed to have been given the opportunity and invited to give a lecture on it a few years back and was indeed fortunate to have attended a conference in which these verses were read in its original Persian language. It was truly exceptional and exquisite. Alhamdulillah!

Song of the Reed

Listen to the reed as it tells its tale;

it complains of separation.

Since they cut me from the reed-bed,

men and women have been crying over my lament.

I wish for someone with a bosom torn apart by separation,

so that I can tell them the meaning of the pain of longing.

Everyone who stays far away from his own origin

seeks to get back to the day he was together with it.

I have been crying in every gathering;

I have kept company with the miserable and the happy.

Everyone has thought he is my friend,

but no one has sought my inner secrets.

My secret is not far from my crying,

but neither eye nor ear has the light to find it.

Body from soul, soul from body are not veiled,

but no one has permission to see the soul.

This call of the reed is fire, not wind.

Everyone who has not this fire--should be naught.

The fire is love that came down into the reed;

its fervor is love that came down into the wine.

The reed is the companion of everyone parted from a beloved.

Its tunes have torn apart our veils.

Who has seen such a poison and antidote as the reed?

Who has seen such a sympathizer and longing lover as the reed?

The reed tells the tale of the Way full of blood.

It tells the love stories of Layla and Majnun.

No one but the delirious is intimate with this consciousness.

The tongue has no customer but the ear.

In our sorrow the days have become untimely.

The days accompany the burning griefs.

If the days are gone, tell them "Go!" and never mind.

But Thou, please stay, for none is as holy as Thou.

Everyone but the fish is fed up with his water.

For everyone without daily bread, his day is very long.

No one who is raw can understand the state of the cooked.

So the talk should be short. "That's all!"