Raficq Abdulla

The Conference of the Birds is a twelfth-century Sufi allegorical poem. The story of the quest for a king undertaken by the birds of the world, it also describes the Sufi (or mystical Islamic) path to enlightenment. Though hugely popular and influential in the Islamic world, the poem is still relatively unfamiliar in the West.

In this edition, the poet Raficq Abdulla has reinterpreted key extracts to make the wisdom of Sufism accessible to the contemporary reader. Combining amusing anecdotes and satire with passages of great mystical beauty, the poem uses the birds’ journey to describe the stages of spiritual experience. This edition is richly illustrated with illuminations from Persian manuscripts.