many years of ascetic ritual observance, it is said that he returned to his
hometown, a suburb of Baghdad, and began to deliver his vision of God’s
message. He spoke of wanting to sacrifice his life for the law and was
imprisoned as insane. When he announced,“I am truth!”he was tried for
shirkand executed in 922 CE. For Attar, the dissolution of the birds in the
divine reenacts his example.
Hallaj’s corpse was burnt and when theflame
Subsided, to the pyre a suficame
Who stirred the ashes with his staffand said:
“Where has that cry‘I am the truth!’nowfled?
All that you cried, all that you saw and knew,
Was but the prelude to what now is true.
The essence lives; rise now and have no fear,
Rise up from ruin, rise and disappear–
All shadows are made of nothing in the one
Unchanging light of Truth’s eternal sun.”^67
Attar could not have known that Suhrawardi would, in 1191, also be
convicted and executed forshirk.
Attar associates the death of al-Hallaj with music through the Phoenix,
alter-ego of the Simurgh, whose perpetual cycle of rebirth articulates the
true meanings of life. He says:
In India lives a bird that is unique:
The lovely phoenix has a long, hard beak
Pierced with a hundred holes, just like aflute–
...Each opening has a different sound; each sound
Means something secret, subtle, and profound–
And as these shrill, lamenting notes are heard,
A silence falls on every listening bird;
Even thefish grow still. It was from this
Sad chant a sage learnt music’s artifice.
The phoenix’life endures a thousand years
And, long before, he knows when death appears;
...(^67) Attar, 1984 : 218.
The Simurgh 99