THE DRUGGIST OF NISHAPUR

THE DRUGGIST OF NISHAPUR by Richard W. Bulliet Farid al-Din Attar, a druggist living in the city of Nishapur, wrote a parable that has captivated readers and inspired artists for almost a thousand years. The Mantiq al-Tayr (Canticle of the Birds) imagines a multitude of birds setting out on a quest to find the Simorgh, a divine raptorial bird in Iranian mythology. The birds traverse seven spiritual valleys: Quest, Love, Understanding, Independence and Detachment, Unity, Astonishment and Bewilderment, and Deprivation and Death. Only thirty birds survive the perils of the journey and achieve a vision of the Simorgh. But that vision turns out to be their own selves reflected in a heavenly mirror, for the name of the divine Simorgh also means “thirty birds” in Persian (si = thirty + morgh = bird). In his sketch of Attar’s live in the Encyclopedia Iranica, B. Reinert tells us the following: While ʿAṭṭār’s works say little else about his life, they tell us that he practiced the profession of pharmacy and personally attended to a very large number of customers . . . His placid existence as a pharmacist and a Sufi does not appear to have ever been interrupted by journeys. In his later years he lived a very retired life . . . He reached an age well over seventy . . . He died a violent death in the massacre which the Mongols inflicted on Nīšāpūr in April, 1221. B. Reinert, “AṬṬĀR, FARĪD-AL-DĪN,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, III/1, pp. 20-25, available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/attar-farid-al-din-poet (accessed March 2017). A second work by Attar, Tadhkirat-i Awliya’, preserves capsule biographies of 72 earlier Sufis, many of them taken from Sufi works composed a century or more earlier by other Nishapur mystics. Though this attests to Attar’s depth of Sufi erudition, none of the mystics in the collection are named in Mantiq al-Tayr. Nor do the seven valleys correlate either with the Sufis had written about stages a Sufi aspirant should pass through in order to become enlightened, or with the conception of a cosmic hierarchy of Sufi authority current in Attar’s era. According to this schema, a single Qutb occupied the highest place in the hierarchy, followed by three Nuqaba, then four Awtad, seven Abrar, 40 Abdal, and 300 Akhyar. How, then, did the vision of the birds’ mystic journey arise, if not from a more general Sufi tradition? Being personally lacking in both spiritual insight and a deep knowledge of Sufi literature, the conclusions I shall put forward in this essay are based primarily upon my understanding of what the city of Nishapur was like during Attar’s lifetime. My starting point is an assumption that Attar could not have envisioned the birds’ progression through the seven valleys if he had not, in some sense, already traversed them himself and experienced the theophany they finally attain to. If that is the case, however, how does a deep spiritual realization of Deprivation and Death square with his supposed “placid existence as a pharmacist and a Sufi”? A map of Nishapur tells a sad tale. I drew in the 1960s after weeks of wandering through the field of buried ruins that is all that is left of the medieval city, and subsequently examining aerial photographs taken in the 1950s. Fig. 1 Map of the ruins of medieval Nishapur The circular area with the crossroads at the upper left demarcates the modern city’s built-up urban area at the time the photographs were taken. The population at that time was approximately 30,000. The stream that runs from north to south 2.5 kilometers east of the modern city bisects a walled area (dotted line) that, with its semicircular southern extension, is about twice the size of the 1950s city. The tomb of Attar, a lovely domed structure now surrounded by an extensive garden, is marked on the map at the center of the southern wall. above the semicircular extension. This location jibes with the tradition that Attar was killed at a ripe old age during the Mongol devastation of the city in 1221. The walls similarly support a tradition that the target of the Mongol attack was a region of the city named Shadyakh. As for the larger city of which Shadyakh was a part, its extent is indicated by lighter of the two dashed lines that cuts through and vastly surpasses the Mongol era walls. Much of that area was doubtless taken up with gardens and orchards supplying the city’s markets; but guess, based on the area within that line, is that Shadyakh was smaller than the large city by a factor of at least five. Thus if Shadyakh, being roughly the size of the modern city of the 1950s, had a population of similar size in Attar’s day, then the population of the larger metropolis, at its peak a century or so before Attar’s birth, should have been on the order of 200,000. No wall encompassed the larger city. Hence, the perimeter I drew on the map derives from two sources: the aerial photographs of the ruins and ground observations that I made in 1966. Irrigation practices in the region draw water from aquifers that are tapped in the mountains north of the city and led to the city through underground channels called qanats. The gentle slope of these channels, as calculated by expert tunneling engineers, brings the water to the surface in the form of small streams, but qanats flowing beneath built-up areas could also be accessed through staircases. Temporary dams divert the steady flow of water that finally exits the qanat onto fields on either side. Low, closely spaced dikes follow the slope of the land so that the water irrigates the highest part of the field; and then, after a fixed amount of time, the dikes are opened so it irrigates the next highest diked area. And so it goes until all of the farmland is irrigated. The lines of dikes show up on aerial photographs function exactly like contour lines on a map. In the completely flat landscape around Nishapur, they are normally parallel to one another and perpendicular to the direction of water flow. When the land surface is irregular, however, the hills and depressions that betray the presence of destroyed buildings fifteen feet or so underground cause the perpendicular lines to curve, and even form circles. The perimeter I have drawn on the map demarcates the limit of such hummocky land. Fig. 2 Aerial photograph of Nishapur ruins circa 1955. Note curved contour lines signaling hills and depressions. My site observations that supplement this indicator of the extent of the ruins derive from the abundant traces of urban remains brought to the surface by yearly plowing, despite the many feet of wind-borne dust that have accumulated over the millennium since the population that dwelt in Nishapur during its heyday disappeared. I would pick a compass direction from a central point in the ruins and then count the number of paces from that point to the point where the myriad potsherds, glass shards, and brickbats no longer appeared underfoot. I go into all this detail to assure the reader that the difference in area between the walled Shadyakh in which Attar lived his adult life and the enormous city that preceded it is not mere conjecture. Rather, it confirms the historical fact that Attar serviced his pharmacy clusters in a walled community surrounded by the deserted buildings of what had been, just a generation before, the largest and most important cultural center in Iran, if not in the entire Islamic world. As an adult, Attar looked, on almost a daily basis, at streets bordered by crumbling houses, mosques with collapsed domes, and charred markets still littered with occupational bric-a-brac. Today’s news photos from war ravaged Syria and Afghanistan, or those from Beirut during its civil war in the 1980s, provide a good model for imagining the abandoned cityscape that lay outside the walls of Shadyakh. But what about Attar in his childhood and teenaged years? Reports that he was in his seventies when the Mongols killed him have led scholars to suggest that he was born around 1145. If that is so, he was fifteen when a devastating earthquake rumbled through. The year 1145 has also been suggested for this earthquake, but the political turmoil of 1161 detailed below makes 1160 more probable. And the following year saw the final abandonment of the main city. Yet natural catastrophe simply put the capstone on many years of strife and destruction. The great city’s educated elite was riven by factional discord that intensified over the course of the eleventh century. The two factions were labeled Hanafi and Shafi‘i for the two preeminent schools of Islamic legal interpretation, but these names surely conceal social, economic, and political cleavages that are no longer recoverable. To skirt around these unknowable aspects of Nishapur’s civil war and focus on its destructive side, I will call the two factions the Pinks and the Greys. In 1153, when Attar may have been eight years old, a group of Turkic nomads refused to obey the reigning Sultan’s demand for a tribute of 30,000 sheep. The Sultan responded militarily, but surprisingly, the nomads defeated his army and took him captive, leaving northeastern Iran undefended. The nomads proceeded to sack a number of cities. Two of Nishapur’s largest mosques were destroyed, and 15,000 male corpses were reportedly recovered from two city quarters. Women and children were carried off as slaves, and the nomads spent several days searching for loot. The walled Inner City, with a citadel on its northern edge (right hand side of Fig. 2), fended off the raiders. But they returned after sacking some smaller cities in the vicinity, and this time they overran and pillaged the Inner City as well. On the heels of this second attack, bandit gangs moved into the city to loot whatever the nomads had missed. An officer of the Sultan named Ay Abah then asserted control over the city and continued as its overlord for twenty years, defending it from both nomads and rival commanders. But a famine that set in immediately after the nomad withdrawal stunted any quick recovery. A city the size of Nishapur depended on the regular arrival of thousands of camel loads of food and other necessities produced in outlying villages, but those villages had also suffered from the nomad rampage. In 1157 a report of skyrocketing prices indicates that rural food production was still lagging behind the city’s requirements. Meanwhile, the rivalry between the Pinks and the Greys continued apace. In 1158, some Pinks killed a Grey, and the Grey leader demanded that the killers be turned over to him. The Pink leader refused. The Greys attacked, killed some Pinks, destroyed the Pink leader’s home, and burned out several streets, including the druggists’ market. Inasmuch as tradesmen in medieval Muslim cities normally clustered together to manufacture and sell their products, it is quite likely that Attar’s father lost his livelihood at this time. The fighting spread over the following months. Pink reinforcements came in from neighboring cities, and every night gangs of Pinks and Greys set fires in the quarters of their foes. Then the nomads attacked for a third time. Attar probably witnessed all of this and experienced the loss of his father’s shop as a young teenager. But he would have been too young to take part in the fighting between the Pinks and the Greys that accelerated after a leading Grey was killed. The Pinks lost schools, mosques, and markets, and their leader fled the city. Within months, however, he returned in the company of the overlord Ay Abah. The revived Pinks took destructive revenge on the Greys, who seem to have retreated to the citadel. Ay Abah worked out a truce, but in 1161 the fighting resumed. A major Pink mosque was destroyed, along with its library, as were thirteen Pink and eight Grey schools that had survived the earlier rounds of pillaging. Precious collections of books were burned or sold off cheaply. It was at this point that Ay Abah selected Shadyakh as the site for a new city. It was a spacious area on the western edge of the great metropolis that had benefited from two episodes of princely building projects in the ninth and eleventh centuries. Ay Abah, who had sponsored the Pink leader’s return to the city, saw to the rebuilding Shadyakh’s walls and moved there with his supporters, leaving the ruins to the Greys, who clustered in the Inner City and awaited Ay Abah’s attack. Holding Nishapur’s only high ground, the Greys mounted mangonels on the walls and cast stones onto any Pink targets they espied. Ay Abah’s attack came in the middle of the year. During his two-month siege a stone from a mangonel killed the Pink leader. The citadel held out, only to surrender a few months later in 1162. The historian who recorded many of the details I have cited completed his chronicle some 40 years later, when eye-witnesses of Nishapur’s fall were still alive. He says of the abandoned metropolis: “Where had been the assembly places of friendliness, the classes of knowledge, and the circles of scholars were now the grazing grounds of sheep and the lurking places of wild beasts and serpents.” Muhammad ar-Rawandi, Rahat as-sudur wa ayat as-surur: Being a History of the Seljuqs. Edited by M. Iqbal. E.J.W. Gibb Memorial Series, n.s. II, London, Luzac, 1912, p. 182. If Attar was born in 1145, he had still not passed his twentieth birthday. Had he experienced the valley of Deprivation and Death? Most probably, along with everyone in his generation. But the Mantiq al-Tayr sees this valley as the ultimate stage of contacting the divine, not as a despairing depth of the sort that many refugees from war and devastation experience. So some sort of transformation takes place in Attar’s mind after 1162. He somehow re-experiences Deprivation and Death as the culminating stage of a sequence of feelings symbolized by the first six valleys. Today’s widely recognized stages of grief — denial, numbness, and shock; bargaining; depression; anger; and acceptance — offer a suggestive comparison. The grief-stricken individual only perceives these stages in retrospect. Similarly, I would suggest, Attar’s transit through the seven valleys signals a deep, lengthy, and surprisingly positive period of meditation upon his unending experience of Nishapur’s destruction, analogous, I would suggest, to Sigmund Freud’s deep dive into the dreams of his childhood. I estimate that 80 percent of the population permanently moved away, the ablest (or richest) of them resettling in the Arab lands and Anatolia to the west, or Afghanistan and India to the east. Though Nishapur’s ruins could have sheltered remnants of the population, without a robust and productive rural economy, rebuilding on a grand scale was impossible. I argue in my book Cotton, Climate, and Camels: A Moment in World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011) that a distinct chilling of the climate contributed to all of Nishapur’s woes. Agricultural production failed to recover, and the cotton industry, which had been the mainstay of the urban economy, collapsed. Soon lists were being compiled to help pious pilgrims as they toured the ruins looking for the graves of famous saints and scholars. There were apparently no local residents left to help them. Unlike today’s survivors of urban destruction, however, who can realistically hope to see international reconstruction aid flowing to their city, there was no light at the end of Nishapur’s tunnel of horror. Shadyakh was destroyed, and Attar killed, in the Mongol invasion of 1221. One must assume that Attar’s meditation on Nishapur’s fall was informed by an increasing understanding of Sufism. Yet Mantiq al-Tayr need not be read solely was a Sufi work. The word Sufi does not appear, nor does the name of any known Sufi. And most strikingly, for a branch of spirituality that was marked by individual verbal explosions expressing an ultimate experience of the divine — Ana al-Haqq (“I am the Truth”), or Ma fi hadhihi al-jubba illa Allah (“There is nothing in this shirt but God”) — it is a group rather than an individual that achieves contact with the divine in the seventh valley. I know of no evidence that the Simorgh, a mythical raptorial bird, was ever understood to be a composite of “thirty birds” before Attar took it as his metaphor for the divine. Thirty, unlike seven or forty, was not a weighty symbolic number in the lands of Islam. To be sure, si meant thirty in Persian and Kurdish, but the syllable is not normally interpreted this way when it appears as a prefix in other Persian words. And I take it for granted that Attar never anticipated the crowded ornithological extravaganzas that Iranian miniaturists had begun to paint by the fifteenth century. So how did Attar hit upon this metaphor? I think again of Freud resorting to the myths of Oedipus and Electra to make his understanding of the unconscious palatable to an educated audience. I believe he was actually recreating the process that Attar went through. 1) Examine to the greatest depth one’s inner feelings. 2) Recognize that those feelings are not simply personal, but common to other people once they have carried out a similar self-examination. 3) Search the common store of myth and legend for tales that can symbolize the link between the mental condition of an individual and the mentality of humankind at large. 4) Set the metaphor free to be exploited and utilized by generations yet unborn. If I put aside the purely Sufi interpretation of Attar’s parable, I can easily imagine that his thirty birds were actually human survivors of the fall of Nishapur. Perhaps Attar found exultation in his tracing of a spiritual path that could look upon Deprivation and Death and see not despair, but a point of contact with the divine, and he wanted to open his path to people he knew in Shadyakh as a way to helping them come to grips with the vanishing of their great metropolis. Thousands of birds begin the journey, but most of them fall away. Were those that persevered to the end, the thirty, actually fellow citizens of Attar who saw themselves, collectively, in the divine mirror as being at the culmination of their spiritual quest? When in his career the druggist of Nishapur wrote Mantiq al-Tayr is unknown. Is it not possible, therefore, that he had not yet become a Sufi when he was struck by the magic of the Simorgh?