The monograph “A knowledge Journey: Philosophical Reading of Farid al-Din Attar’s Poem ‘The Language of Birds” by Yu. E. Fedorova, a worker of the Philosophy of the Islamic World Department of the RAS Institute of Philosophy came out of print a few days ago. The book is the 16th volume of the series “Philosophical Thought of the Islamic World: Research”, issued by the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences with the support of Ibn Sina Foundation since 2009.
The monograph features a philosophical analysis of the poem “The Language of Birds” (Mantik at-tayr) by Farid al-Din Attar Nishapuri (1145/46-1221), one of the major Persian Sufi poets. The study reveals two layers of meanings: the explicit, which refers to the poetic history, and the implicit, which refers to Sufi concepts. The parallel existence of two layers of meanings reflects a fundamental truth of the universe: the “parallelism”, the specularity of God and the world. In the classical Arab-Muslim culture, the parallelism between the structure of a poem and its main idea demonstrates the writer’s skill and facilitates the correct understanding of the entire poem.
Selected chapters from the poem “The Language of Birds” have been published as a monograph annex.
The book is intended for a wide range of readers interested in classical Persian poetry and the history of Arab Muslim philosophy.
