Suhrawardi and the Simurgh: Avicenna's bird, in Persian

The previous article read an Ottoman encyclopedia in Turkish. This one goes back to Iran and picks up a loose end from the article on Avicenna: Ibn Sina's Treatise of the Bird, which I could not read there. I have now read it in the Persian version by Suhrawardi, a philosopher of the same era as Attar, together with two more texts by Suhrawardi with birds, one of them with a Simurgh. I read them in the Persian-English edition of W. M. Thackston (1999), and the Persian sentences I quote I transcribed from its pages. What I did not read, I say at the end.

Who Suhrawardi was

According to the English Wikipedia, Shihab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi was born in 1154 in Suhraward, a village between Zanjan and Bijar, in present-day Iran, studied in Maragheh, and spent some years in Iraq and Syria. Suhrawardi founded the school of Illumination (ishrāq), and is called "the Master of Illumination" and "the Murdered Master". The most repeated version is that Suhrawardi was executed in Aleppo by order of al-Malik al-Zahir, son of Saladin, accused of Batini teachings; there are other traditions about the death, and the dates do not agree: Wikipedia gives 1191 as the end of Suhrawardi's life and says the execution may have been between 1191 and 1208.¹

Thackston explains that Suhrawardi's short texts, the recitals (risāla), follow a form that Ibn Sina had used before, and that, unlike Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi chose Persian for them. Thackston also recalls that, in the Tale of Occidental Exile, Suhrawardi confesses to having been disappointed with Ibn Sina's Hayy ibn Yaqzan and Salaman and Absal, because the great mystery was not stated in the first and was hidden behind philosophers' symbols in the second.²

A bird of Avicenna's, in Persian

The first of the texts Thackston edits is The Treatise of the Birds (Treatise I), and a note by Thackston says it is Suhrawardi's Persian translation of Ibn Sina's Risālat al-ṭayr. The Persian rubric says: "Translation of 'the tongue of truth', which is the Treatise of the Bird."² I did not read Ibn Sina's Arabic original, only this version.

The narrator is a bird flying with its flock that falls into the net of some hunters who lay baited traps and scarecrows and make calls so attractive that they are taken in. Caught, they take so long to get used to the bonds that they forget how they were. One day it sees that some companions have got their heads and wings out of the net and are about to fly, with remnants of fetters on their legs, and remembers who it was and is ashamed. The companions are wary, but end up helping. When it asks them to remove the fetter from its leg too, they say that, if they could, they would have removed their own first: "no one seeks a cure from a sick physician."²

They fly between two roads to a peak from which they see eight more mountains. They cross six, and on the seventh there are gardens so beautiful that, according to the text, they bewitched the eye and drew the mind from the body; a voice warns that there is no security without precaution and no fortress stronger than scepticism, and they go on. On the eighth a governor receives them and tells them of a city on high where the king lives. There, a pavilion and a courtyard so vast they cannot be taken in by the eye, and another beyond, and in the chamber the king's radiance dazzles them so much that they lose consciousness. The king revives them and lets them speak; they ask to have the remnants of the fetters removed, and the king answers that only whoever put them on can remove them, and gives them a messenger to compel that.²

Here there is no Simurgh, there is a king. And the ending has a turn that this Diary cares about. The narrator's friends, hearing the tale, say that a fairy or a demon has bewitched the narrator: "you never flew; it is your mind that flew", that there must be too much yellow bile, and that the narrator should take an infusion of epithymon, have tepid baths, rub on water-lily oil and not think too much. Thackston notes at the foot that epithymon and water-lily oil are prescribed for melancholia in the medical treatises of al-Razi and in Avicenna's Canon.² It is the melancholy of the ancients that appears in the article on Ficino, Saturn and Dürer, here as the diagnosis with which others dismiss someone who has come back from a journey. The text ends: "my hope is in God, and anyone who does not heed what I have said is ignorant", and a Quranic quotation against the unjust.

The hoopoe that becomes a Simurgh

Treatise VIII is called Ṣafīr-i Sīmurgh, "The Simurgh's Shrill Cry", and is an original text of Suhrawardi. It opens with a thesis about the bird: every hoopoe that leaves its nest in spring, plucks its feathers with its beak and sets off for Mount Qaf will fall under the shadow of Qaf for a thousand years, and the text quotes Quran 22:47 ("a day with your Lord is as a thousand years of those you count"). Those thousand years, in the calendar of the People of Reality, "are but one dawning ray from the orient of the Divine Realm". And it goes on:²

درین مدت سیمرغی شود که صفیر او خفتگان را بیدار کند

"During this time it becomes a Simurgh whose shrill cry awakens those who are asleep." The Simurgh's nest is on Qaf. "His cry reaches everyone, but he has few listeners; everyone is with him, but most are without him."²

The rest of the description is in this vein: it flies without moving and soars without wings, approaches without traversing space, all colours are from it and it has none, its nest is in the orient and the occident is not void of it. And the text asks: "Since you have not seen Solomon, what do you know of the birds' language?" It is the same Quranic phrase (27:16) that gives its title to Attar's poem, as told in the article on Attar.²

In Attar, the hoopoe guides and the Simurgh is at the end of the road. Here the hoopoe, with time, is the Simurgh. The treatise goes on in two parts, one on origins and one on aims: annihilation, delight in God. I read the opening and the end. The end is full of sufis accused of heresy: the executioner is about to kill Nuri, and Nuri hurries to be the first to die so as to give his brothers the moment of life he has left; and Hallaj, while being crucified, says: "the aim of the ecstatic is that the One reduce him to total oneness."² That Suhrawardi ended up murdered is a resonance that I put there; the text does not say it.

The Simurgh of the mirror

In Treatise III, The Red Intellect, the narrator is a falcon talking with an old man. The old man says the Simurgh has its nest at the top of the Tuba tree: at dawn it leaves and spreads its wing over the earth, and from its effect come the fruits and plants. It is the Simurgh that raised Zal, and the narrator asks how Rustam killed Isfandiyar with its help.²

The answer differs from the one Wikipedia gives for the Shahnameh, where Isfandiyar is killed by an arrow, on the Simurgh's advice.³ Suhrawardi tells it like this:

در سیمرغ آن خاصیت است که اگر آیینه‌ای یا مثل آن برابر سیمرغ بدارند هر دیده که در آن آیینه نگرد خیره شود

"The Simurgh has this property: if a mirror or something like it is held before the Simurgh, any eye that looks into that mirror is dazzled." Zal has a breastplate made of polished iron, a polished helmet, and covers Rustam's horse with mirrors; when the Simurgh stands opposite Rustam, the bird's rays fall on the breastplate and the mirrors, and the reflection strikes Isfandiyar's eyes; he thinks they have been pierced, falls from his horse and dies at Rustam's hand.² I do not know whether that version predates Suhrawardi or is Suhrawardi's own invention: I did not find out.

The old man adds that there is not just one Simurgh: at every instant one comes from the Tuba and another goes, and then explains the twelve workshops, the seven masters (which Thackston identifies with the seven planetary bodies, from Saturn to the Moon) and David's chain mail, which the old man says are the fetters: a falcon like the narrator has the chain mail put on its neck. The sword Balarak, which breaks it, is in the hands of an executioner; it seems to be death, and that is my reading.²

Four birds, side by side

According to Wikipedia, Attar's poem is from 1177,³ and Suhrawardi lived until 1191.¹ I do not say that one read the other: I found nothing that says so. What can be seen is that in Persian, in the 12th century, there are at least several ways of telling of a bird that arrives at something, and that the mirror appears in two of them. The piece below puts the three texts of Suhrawardi and Attar's poem side by side.

They are four ways of telling what is at the end: a king whose radiance makes one lose consciousness, a bird that in a thousand years becomes the goal, a Simurgh whose mirror blinds and a mirror that gives back thirty birds. The clearest difference is the mirror: in Suhrawardi it dazzles and in Attar it gives back.

What I could not read

I read Suhrawardi in a digitised copy of Thackston's book (Mazda, 1999). It is a book under copyright: I quote short sentences and do not reproduce it. The Persian I quote, transcribed by me from the scan, is the text Thackston edits; I did not check it against the editions of Corbin and Nasr or any manuscript. Of Treatise I I read everything; of Treatises III and VIII, only the passages I discuss (the rest in English and in leaps); the other treatises I barely skimmed. The numbering of the treatises is Thackston's. I did not read Ibn Sina's Arabic original, and I do not know when each text of Suhrawardi was written. Suhrawardi's life and death I take from Wikipedia, and my Persian is a reader's, not a specialist's: if you read Persian and see a mistake, this Diary needs you to say so.

What we do with this

There is a sentence of Suhrawardi that serves the Observatory: the Simurgh's cry "reaches everyone, but he has few listeners". It is what happens with the world's hour: it reaches anyone, and only those who coincide listen. What the Observatory counts is the voices that arrived and at what UTC hour, and nothing more: how many listened, not what each one heard.