Reading room

Ilahi-nama (The Book of God)

Attar

A masnavi of some 6,500 couplets with a frame story: a caliph asks his six sons what they desire, and each asks for something marvellous (the daughter of the king of the fairies, mastery of magic, Jamshid's world-reflecting cup, the water of life, Solomon's ring, alchemy). The father shows them that, taken literally, these wishes are absurd, but that understood inwardly they can be fulfilled: the princess is the purified soul, the cup is the mystic united with God, the elixir is the divine light that transforms everything. Hundreds of stories, from three to four hundred lines, illustrate the same message as the *Mantiq al-tayr*: what man seeks is within him.