It was in China, late one moonless night - Part V: representations of privacy in literature and film

Social Research, Fall, 2003 by Hamid Dabashi

   This book is an adornment for all times,
   The elite and the masses will benefit from it alike.
   My poetry has a strange attraction,
   Because every time you read it you benefit from it more.
   If you can only read it repeatedly,
   You will undoubtedly like it more every time.
   What I have given my readers like a gift
   Will forever remain even after I die.
   Until the Day of Judgment
   People will remember me.
   If the Nine Spheres of the Universe were to collapse
   Nothing will be diminished from this book.
   Anyone who finds his way into this book,
   No veil will remain between him and Truth

   (Nishapuri, 1963: 248).

Attar had every reason to boast about his magnum opus. He is a solid figure in a triumvirate of master poets that includes Hakim Sana'i (d. 1150) and Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273), and who collectively constitute the pantheon of Persian parabolic poetry. "The Conference of the Birds" is the masterpiece of Attar's prolific career as a poet of unprecedented creative effervescence. Although he composed many other discursive poems of extraordinary elegance and simplicity, none of them achieved the global celebration of "The Conference of the Birds." Attar's Mantiq al-Tayr is the cosmogonic summation of the Persian literary attendance on reality. The dramatic composition of "The Conference of the Birds" is evident from its very beginning, when Attar commences his narrative with a full, by then conventional, convocation in praise of the Divinity and all his Apostolic mercy, particularly that of Prophet Muhammad, and all the saintly configuration of grace that he summoned and embraced. This is Attar's poetic piety at its best. God and His Apostolic convocations of all the saintly figures that grace Attar's pious memory come together here and inaugurate the text as "Conference" of a sacred occasion. With grace and humility, sanctity and propriety, Attar moves his readers into the inner sanctum of their innermost holiness. This is no simple act of poetic composition to heed the convention. Attar in effect gathers his readers around his poem very much the same way that Hoopoe, his chief protagonist, will soon commence to gather the scattered birds of the universe. This is a congregation of grace incarnate, the constitution of a communion of hope among those who believe in God the One and His Apostolic succession of emissaries. Attar the poet is now himself the Hoopoe that invites his readers into the sanctity of their own re/membered truth, their faith in the Unseen. Just like the birds that Hoopoe is gathering around himself, the Muslims around Attar are those "Who believe in the Unseen" (Qur'an: II: 3)--God the Unseen who makes all the seen things visible. These birds are gathered here to go and see their One and Only King, the invisible Simorgh, in a verisimilitude of Muslims looking for their Invisible God. It is as if until and unless these birds see Simorgh, their One and Only but Invisible King, they cannot see themselves, that they too are invisible. There is thus a repressed visuality in Attar's Mantiq al-Tayr, the all-but-forgotten focus of its subconscious. Retrieving that repressed visuality, Shirin Neshat's turn to "The Conference of Birds" is no accident of exilic curiosity. She and her companions, all former Persian post-Muslims, now in the bright daylight of their globally forgotten nation and faith, have been beating around the bush of Attar's "Conference of the Birds" for too long, finally to tap on its repressed visuality, its textual subconscious, and from there, from Attar's pious remembrance of the Sacred Text, back to the Book Itself, to the Qur'an itself, its paternal Arabic majesty mellowed into Attar's maternal Persian--the il pensiero debole of the Islamic metaphysics (Vattimo, 1983).