Parable of the Moths, Part 2

Leyla: Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation: Attar’s Parable of the Moths That Wanted to Know More About Their Beloved with Omid Arabian, Part Two. salām omid jān! Thank you for joining me for Part Two of this wonderful story!

Omid: salām leylā khānoom, my pleasure, once again!

Leyla: So, as you heard in the last episode… if you haven't heard the last episode, go listen to that first; these are cumulative! We introduced this story, Attar’s “Parable of the Moths,” taken from what you might know as The Conference of the Birds. We talked about that title a little bit as well. There are 16 lines that Omid has chosen for us to learn in this series, on this particular parable, and we are currently on lines five through eight. Just as we did in the last lesson, we’re going to read the entire lesson, lines five through eight. Omid’s going to read the Persian, and I’m going to read the English. Is there anything that you want people to think about before we get started, Omid?

Omid: No, just to remember… hopefully, you've just listened to or recently listened to the first part! Just remember where we were in the story, which was that a group of moths have gathered in a dark place one night, and they're seeking their object of desire, their beloved, which is the candle. They're wishing that one of them would go and bring some awareness, some khabar, some news of the candle, and so one of the moths flies out, towards a palace where the candle apparently is located, and, from a distance, sees some light in that palace emanating from the candle and then comes back to the group, comes back to the other moths, opens its notebook, and begins to relate kind of what it has understood about the candle.

Leyla: Episode one recap, okay!

Omid: That's right!

Leyla: Okay, so line 5?

Omid: Sure!

nāghedee k’oo dāsht dar majma' mehee

goft oo-rā neest az sham’ āgahee.

Leyla: A pundit/sage who had a position of authority among them said: “This moth does not have a true understanding/awareness of the candle."

Omid: shod yekee deegar gozasht az noor dar.

kheesh-rā bar sham’ zad az door dar.

Leyla: Another one of the moths went and passed through the light. It flung itself towards the candle from a distance.

Omid: par zanān dar partoyé matloob shod.

sham’ ghāleb gasht ō oo maghloob shod.

Leyla: Fluttering its wings, it entered into the beloved’s radiance, but the candle, its heat, won out, and it, the moth, became overpowered.

Omid: bāzgasht oo neez va moshtee rāz goft.

az vesālé sham’ sharhee bāz goft.

Leyla: This moth also returned and revealed a handful of mysteries. It told an account of its close encounter with the candle.

A lot has happened in these 4 lines, okay! So, let’s go over the fifth line again…

Omid: nāghedee k’oo dāsht dar majma' mahee

goft oo-rā neest az sham’ āgahee.

Leyla: A pundit/sage who had a position of authority among them said: “This moth does not have a true understanding/awareness of the candle."

Okay, let’s go through this one, word by word. First, “nāghedee.”

Omid: Remember that the first moth has gone and brought some news, some awareness of the candle, and it's sharing it with the other moths. We're back in that enclosure, the “mazeegh.” In this space, there's a character that Attar calls “nāghed.” “nāghed” is an interesting word, not so much in use in conversational Farsi today, but in its most basic sense, a “nāghed” is somebody who has discernment, who can tell one thing from another. More literally, “nāghed” was somebody who could tell real gold or silver currency from the fake ones: “naghd,” which is ‘currency’. “nāghed” was somebody who was familiar with whether currency was genuine or false. That was the specific meaning, but more generally, it started to get applied to anyone who could tell one thing from another, falsehood from truth, what makes sense from what doesn't make sense. In a general sense, I translated it as a pundit or a sage, somebody who knows and can express discernment about something, so “nāghedee” becomes a “nāghed," “yek nāghedee,” just like we had “yek shabee” or “yek mazeeghee.”

Leyla: Exactly, right, and then again, we have the kāf-alef-vāv. Again, it’s a contraction, “k’oo,” ‘that he/she'. “dāsht,” ‘had’, “dar,” ‘in’, “majma’ mahee.” Okay, what is that?

Omid: “majma’”… we had the word “jam’” before: “yek shabee parvānegān jam' āmadand.” “jam’” implies a coming together, a gathering, and “majma’” is another form of “jam’.” Again, it means a ‘gathering’. ‘In this gathering’, it's like a noun, ‘in a gathering’. This “nāghed,” this pundit or sage had, in this gathering, “dāsht dar majma' mahee.” “meh” is kind of a grandness or a high position, so “mahee” is a sense of or a position of importance or authority or honor. If you have “mahee,” you're in a position of authority or honor in a group or in a gathering. “dāsht dar majma' mahee” means ‘in this gathering, the pundit had a position of respect or honor or greatness’.

Leyla: And then is “mahee” a word that we would use in current conversation?

Omid: Not very much, not very much. 

Leyla: Yeah, okay, so it’s one of those key words that we have to know!

Omid: Yeah. Just as a side note, it usually comes with its counterpart, which is “keh.” “keh” and “meh.” “keh” means ‘smaller’ or ‘the lesser’ of a position, and “meh” means kind of a ’higher' position. They usually come together, but here, it's just “mehee,” the higher position. We don't use it that much, yeah.

Leyla: Okay, so “goft oo,” ‘he or she said’…

Omid: Yeah, “goft,” ‘he or she said’, and then the next part is what the sage says. Yeah, that's also part of reading. Poetry is knowing when each section or each word kind of has to lead to a pause. “goft” means the nāghed or the pundit said, and then the rest of it is what he said.

Leyla: Okay. “oo-rā neest az sham’ āgahee.”

Omid: Yeah.

Leyla: Okay!

Omid: Let's pause there!

Leyla: So it’s throwing shade!

Omid: Yeah!

Leyla: Throwing some shade at the one…

Omid: It’s totally throwing shade, yeah. “goft,” ‘the pundit said’, “oo-rā neest.” We have to just open that up. “neest” is 'there isn't'. “oo” goes back to the first moth that has been describing the candle, so the pundit says, “oo-rā neest,” ‘that moth does not have’, “oo-rā neest.” When you put the “-rā” in the middle there, between “oo” and “neest,” you get a sense that the “neest” does not mean ‘is not’, but rather, it's a possession. “oo-rā neest,” 'he doesn't have, it doesn't have, she doesn't have'.

Leyla: Got it.

Omid: Yeah. It shifts the meaning of “neest” from ‘isn’t’ to 'hasn't', just to put that “-rā…"

Leyla: That’s interesting. One thing we kind of alluded to, but this is a basic thing of Persian, is that Persian does not have gendered pronouns, so “oo” can be ‘he, she, it, they’ as the singular ‘they’ that we use. “oo” is referring to the moth, but then the “-rā” is what we call a direct object marker. In this case, it’s indicating the object that is directing us to an understanding, the moth.

Omid: Yeah, the understanding of the moth, which we're going to get to the word ‘understanding’ in a second. “oo-rā neest,” then, here means ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘they’, 'doesn't have'.

Leyla: ‘Doesn’t have’?

Omid: Yeah, in modern conversation, I would say “nadārad,” “oo nadārad.”

Leyla: Gotcha, right, whereas if we just said “oo neest,” it would mean 'the moth isn't', but 'the moth doesn't have'…

Omid: Right, “oo-rā neest” means the moth doesn’t have, perfect! What doesn’t the moth have? “az sham’ āgahee,” all right, “āgahee,” let’s talk about that word. It's a contraction of “āgāhee,” which means, again, ‘awareness’, the same kind of idea as… remember “khabar,” which we had earlier? “āgāhee” or “āgahee” means also ‘awareness’. We say “man āgāh hastam,” ‘I have awareness’. “man āgāh neestam,” 'I don't have awareness'.

Leyla: So now, in modern Persian, when we use “āgahee” for ‘advertisement’, is it the same? Advertising is awareness…

Omid: Supposedly, yeah, it is, in a sense! It's to make you aware of a product or an offering or whatever. Exactly.

Leyla: Interesting!

Omid: Same idea in “āgahee” as ‘advertising’, absolutely.

Leyla: Okay, “az sham’ āgahee,” ‘of the candle, does not have awareness’.

Omid: So ‘the moth does not have awareness of the candle’. This is what the pundit or the sage declares: “goft oo-rā neest az sham’ āgahee.” It says this moth does not have true awareness of the candle. Why? Perhaps because the moth has only seen the candle from a distance. That's why the previous verse, we were kind of emphasizing the idea, the previous lesson, the idea that this moth only goes a certain way. It doesn't go all the way to the candle, from a distance, sees the candle, comes back, and relates.

Leyla: Right, wonderful. And the next line?

Omid: shod yekee deegar gozasht az noor dar.

kheesh-rā bar sham’ zad az door dar.

Leyla: Okay, ‘another one of the moths went’ or ‘flew and passed through the light of the candle. It flung itself towards the candle from a distance’.

What I was gonna say is I hear these words, and they’re all very simple, but the way they’re put together, I’m confused by, so I’m excited to go through this!

Omid: Yeah, the reordering of the words really can easily throw us off, but once we get each word’s meaning in place, then we put them all together. Then we can put them back in the order that makes more sense conversationally.

Leyla: Let's do it!

Omid: That's the fun of it! It starts again with “shod,” which we had in the previous lesson. Here, “shod” means ‘flew’ or ‘went’ rather than ‘became’. Now, who went, we have to ask? “yekee deegar.” “deegar,” ‘other’, so “yekee deegar,” ‘another’. Here, it refers to another one of the moths. It's implied that's ‘another one’ means ‘another one of the moths’, so another one of the moths went, presumably by flying. “gozasht az noor,” ‘passed the light’, or ‘passed through the lights’, one could say. “noor” was the 'light'; “gozasht az noor,” ‘passed’ or ‘pass through the light’. The second moth passes through the light. Here, at the end of this half-verse or “mesra',” we have the word “dar.” Now, why do we have this word “dar”? What does that have to do with it?

Leyla: I don't know, “dar” could mean… well, of my understanding of it, it could mean ‘inside’, or it could mean ‘door’.

Omid: Or within, yeah, yeah, exactly, and it shows up in the second half of the verse as well at the end. In both halves of this verse, the word “dar” is really just extraneous to the syntax. It's not a necessary word at all, but it's thrown in there. It's used there to complete the meter so that you have the same meter as the previous verses also. Otherwise, it would be “shod yekee deegar gozasht az noor,” and then you're like “wait, this is missing a syllable” because you are now in the music and the meter of the poem. You're like “wait, this is missing a syllable," so the ”dar" is thrown in there as an extra word to add that extra syllable to make the verse rhyme and also have the same meter as the other half of the other verses as well. Does that make sense?

Leyla: Does it have a meaning, the word?

Omid: Here, it doesn’t really. You could easily just say “shod yekee deegar gozasht az noor.” It’s really unnecessary, but it also doesn't necessarily throw you off. If you're familiar with the idea that “dar” or these kinds of prepositions, like I said, in Farsi, it can just be used kind of willy nilly, just thrown in there to mean whatever or nothing even, sometimes. The main idea is that another of the moths goes forth, flies towards and passes through the light of the candle. That's the first half of it, and then “kheesh-rā bar sham’ zad.” Let's start with that. “kheesh” is what, Leyla?

Leyla: ‘Self’.

Omid: Self, exactly. The “-rā,” as we said, implies that there's a transitive kind of action happening to the self. It's doing something to itself. What is it doing? Yes, right, “kheesh-rā bar sham’ zad.” “zadan” is ‘to throw,’. It could also mean ‘to hit’ but here is ‘to throw’, so ‘it threw itself’, “kheesh-rā zad.” Where did it throw itself? “bar sham’,” ‘at the candle’. ‘It threw itself at the candle’. “az door,” ‘from a distance’. This is a repetition of an idea that we had in the last lesson. Just like the first moth that experiences the candle from a distance “az door,” the second moth also experiences the candle ”az door," although one could say ‘close’. It gets closer than the first one because the first moth just sees the light and then comes back and reports, whereas this moth passes through the light and throws itself at the candle, but it's still from a distance.

Leyla: Okay. That throws me off a little bit because “bar sham’ zad,” it sounds like it's right there and hits itself on the…

Omid: Exactly.

Leyla: But then it says immediately “az door,” so then you're like…

Omid: “az door,” yeah.

Leyla: Okay, wait, it's not so close as I would normally imagine!

Omid: Exactly, then the “dar” once again in the second half of the verses, just to keep the rhyme of it…

Leyla: So let's read those first two lines again just to feel it and hear it.

Omid: nāghedee k’oo dāsht dar majma' mahee

goft oo-rā neest az sham’ āgahee.

shod yekee deegar gozasht az noor dar.

kheesh-rā bar sham’ zad az door dar.

Leyla: All right, okay, so let's see what's going on here! The next line?

Omid: par zanān dar partoyé matloob shod.

sham’ ghāleb gasht ō oo maghloob shod.

Leyla: Okay, an action-packed line!

Omid: Indeed, indeed, which kind of explains the previous line, that preserved contradiction between flinging yourself at the candle but from a distance. Here, Attar explains a little bit. It starts with “par zanān.” “par,” ‘feathers’ or ‘wings’, in this case, probably ‘wings’. “zanān,” that’s the plural of “zan,” which means ‘women’, but “zanān” has to do with “zadan” again, which we had in the previous verse. So “par zadan” is not ‘to hit your wings’ or not ‘to throw your wings’ but ‘to flutter your wings’. Then “zanān” is kind of this present tense that describes an action that's ongoing. “par zanān,” ‘in the act of fluttering its wings’. Fluttering its wings, “dar partoyé matloob shod.” “shod,” like the previous verse, has to do with ‘going’. It went while it's fluttering its wings. This moth goes or went “dar partoyé matloob.” Here, “dar” actually does have an important role here. Here, it means ‘into’, so it goes into “partoyé matloob.” “partoyé” means ‘the radiance of’ something. ‘It goes into the ray of light’ or ‘into the radiance of’ what? Of “matloob.”

Leyla: “matloob," which we had before.

Omid: ‘That which is being desired’. The ‘object of desire' here is going back to the candle. All right, so if we put it all together, “par zanān dar partoyé matloob shod,” ‘fluttering its wings, it goes’, “shod,” or ‘it went’, “dar partoyé matloob,” ‘into the radiance of the candle’, of its desired beloved candle.

Leyla: And that word “partō,” is that one we use in conversation now?

Omid: It is. It's a little bit bookish, but we do use it, and it is fairly common in modern usage. And it just means, yeah, a ‘ray of light’, a ‘ray of radiance’, something that emanates from a source of light.

Leyla: I like that it repeats the word “par” in two different ways that are kind of two different meanings. That's really…!

Omid: Yeah, yeah, it's lovely to note these little, delicate things that these poets kind of bring into their work, and it's not easily caught. It could easily be lost, but as you beautifully caught it, “par," and then “partō.” Just in the sound of it, it also sounds beautiful, the repetition, absolutely.

Leyla: Right. One thing that’s interesting is that in Persian, we have all these compound verbs. “zadan” is one that is used a lot, and I’ve seen it translated in a lot of different ways. The most obvious, or the most literal, is ‘to beat’, ‘to hit’, but I think also ‘to beat’ is a good one. Yeah, so ‘to beat your wings’.

Omid: Exactly.

Leyla: It works in a lot of different things, if you think of it like that. I mean, “dād zadan” is to yell out, so I don’t know that one, but there’s so many that have to do with ‘beating’, and we kind of just use it subconsciously when we’re speaking Persian. Sometimes, if you think about it more literally, I think the ‘beating’ is a good one here.

Omid: Yeah, and once you find that perfect word in the language of translation, like we just did with ‘beat’, then it all clicks together, like “oh, it makes sense in both ways!" That's the perfect translation. That's the perfect work, exactly.

Leyla: It’s funny ‘cause it’s such a small difference, ‘to hit’ and ‘to beat’, but then it makes sense. All right, and then the second half…

Omid: “sham’ ghāleb gasht ō oo maghloob shod.” He's continuing the narrative. The moth now has fluttered its wings or beat its wings, and it's gone towards into the radiance of its beloved candle. What happens when that happens? “sham’ ghāleb gasht.” “sham’” being ‘the candle’, “gasht” means ‘became’. One of the meanings of “gasht” is ‘became’. We say “shod” in regular language, but “gasht” is also that: ‘it became’. “ghāleb,” “ghāleb” and “maghloob,” which happens right after that, are another subject-object pair, two forms of the root word “ghalabé,” which means ‘to overpower’, ‘to overcome’. “sham’ ghāleb gasht,” ‘the candle overcame’. “oo maghloob shod,” or “ō oo maghloob shod,” “oo” again goes back to the…

Leyla: “maghloob” this time, not “matloob,” right?

Omid: Right, exactly, just like “matloob,” here, we have “maghloob,” right. Again, it's the object form of the word, but the word here is “ghalabé,” which means ‘to overcome’, so “maghloob” means ‘somebody who becomes overcome, who becomes overpowered’. The candle is the “ghāleb.” The candle is the thing that overcomes, and “oo,” which is the moth, is that which becomes overcome, which becomes kind of overpowered. “oo maghloob shod.”

Leyla: Is “ghāleb” the same word that we use now as, like, a ‘cast’, like something to put…?

Omid: No, great question! No, they're homonyms, but they're spelled differently. “ghāleb,” the one that means ‘cast’, is with a ghāf, which has two dots over it. This ghāleb is with a ghayn, which has one dot over it.

Leyla: Okay. It has similar meanings, so it threw me off, but these are Arabic words, is that right?

Omid: They come from the Arabic, but they're very much part of modern Farsi as well.

Leyla: Yes, but I hadn’t really understood that in Arabic, there’s three different consonants, and then they get kind of messed around with vowels to make different meanings. Then that’s what we have here, where we have “ghāleb” and then “maghloob.” It’s just changing a little bit where we put the vowels, and then it has a different meaning of like object and then subject, and all that.

Omid: Perfect! The three root consonants are ghayn, lam, and bé. Those three consonants, as you said, get kind of interjected with other kind of letters and other sounds to give different meanings to the subject of the act or the object of the act.

Leyla: Wonderful! Yeah, I didn’t mean to say they’re Arabic words. I get that all the time when I’m teaching Persian, and people say, “All you taught was Arabic!” Do you have a small little PSA that you can provide for that?

Omid: It's really simple. I mean, we just have to come to terms with the fact that so much of what we call modern Farsi is very much infused with words that come from the Arabic. We've used it for centuries now. It's just a fact. I mean, we have to just hopefully get past the good or bad of it all and just admit to the fact of it.

Leyla: It’s the other way around, too. There’s a lot of Persian words in Arabic that they use as well that are part of their language. It goes both ways.

Omid: Yeah, of course, of course, absolutely! I know I'll get letters from this, too, because there's a lot of purists out there that want to kind of cleanse all of that, but let's not go into that. That's a whole other conversation.

Leyla: But your last name is Arabian, so you have nothing to…!

Omid: My last name is Arabian, exactly! How far can I go into that conversation? Exactly, how much can I object?

Leyla: All right, okay, the last line that we’re going to go over today?

Omid: Sure. Now we've seen that this moth gets further than the previous moth, but again, as it gets close, somewhere a little bit closer to the candle, it's still from a distance. Even at that level of closeness or distance, somehow the candle overcomes this moth, presumably the heat of the candle, because when you get too close, the heat of the candle starts to get felt. Now this moth kind of becomes overpowered, which means that it doesn't get any closer. It gets too affected by this heat of the candle. What will that make the moth do? Presumably, it's going to retreat. It’s not going to get fully into the candle now even though it gets a little bit closer. The next line kind of expresses that. Attar says:

bāzgasht oo neez va moshtee rāz goft.

az vesālé sham’ sharhee bāz goft.

Leyla: This moth also returned and revealed a handful of mysteries. It told an account of its close encounter/interaction/connection with the candle.

Omid: Yeah, those three words, ‘encounter’, ‘interaction’, ‘connection’, all go back to the same word, which is “vesāl,” but we're going to get there in a moment. Let's start with the beginning of the verse, “bāzgasht oo.” “oo” goes back to the moth again, the second moth. “bāzgasht,” in modern language, we say “bargasht.” “bar” is kind of a 'reverse'. It applies ‘in reverse’. “bāzgasht” is the same idea. ‘It returned’.

Leyla: Yeah, which we had that very word in the last line that we learned last lesson, “bāzgasht ō daftaré khod bāz kard.” That time, it opened its notebook. This time, what did this one do?

Omid: This one comes “neez,” which means ‘also’, so this one also comes back. “ō moshtee rāz goft.” “ō,” “va,” ‘and’. “moshtee,” “mosht” means a ‘fist’. “moshtee” is ‘a fistful’, like A Fistful of Dollars, the Clint Eastwood movie, but here, ‘a handful’ or ‘a fistful’ of “rāz.” “rāz,” ‘mysteries’, ‘secrets’. This implies that we are kind of in the realm of mysticism, that when the moth comes back from the encounter of the candle, it speaks of mysteries. It's a mysterious thing that ultimately this whole story is trying to talk about. This moth comes back. “moshtee rāz goft,” ‘it tells a handful of secrets or mystery’. Also, it's good to remember that when we say 'a handful' I think in English, it's the same connotation. “moshtee,” it means not a whole lot. It's just a few, handful of things, so “moshtee rāz,” ‘a handful of secrets’. It implies that in this encounter, the moth has gained some awareness of this mysterious kind of candle and is bringing back that awareness, but again, it's not a whole lot. It's “moshtee.” It's a handful.

Leyla: Although in conversation, you could say “yé moshtee harf zad,” “moshtee harf zad.”

Omid: ‘A bunch of…’, yeah.

Leyla: Just ‘a bunch of stuff’, yeah.

Omid: But it's dismissive. The connotation is like “yé mosht,” “yé mosht.”

Leyla: Yeah, it’s always dismissive, yeah, pretty much, yeah. “yé moshtee cheezee goft!”

Omid: Yeah, yeah, when you say it like that, it’s clearly dismissive!

Leyla: Yeah, I imagine that this moth is talking, and everyone’s like “yeah, okay!"

Omid: Although the “rāz,” the fact that it's secrets and mysteries, does give it credence, so it has gained something. It's not just…

Leyla: Maybe it’s like “yé moshtee rāz goft!”

Omid: Right, right, it's kind of like two words that almost moderate each other, the “moshtee” and the “rāz.” The “rāz” tells you it's something meaningful and weighty and useful, but then it's “moshtee,” so it's not a lot of it. It's like a modicum of it. It's like a handful. And then “goft,” now this second one ‘tells’, of these few mysteries, handful of mysteries. What are these about? “az vesālé sham’ sharhee bāz goft.” These mysteries are about “az vesālé sham’.” It's ‘of’, “az,” here, ‘of’ “vesāl,” which is that word that we just talked about briefly. “vesāl” has the notion of ‘uniting’ with something, ‘having a connection’ with something, this connecting into action, this interaction of somehow connecting with the candle, “vesālé sham’,” ‘the connection with the candle’. “vesāl” is a very, very important and recurring word in mysticism, which has to do with one's ideal experience with the beloved, with the divine, with one's own essential self to come together and unite with oneself. That is the ultimate kind of experience that the mystics talk about and encourage all of us to try to have. This moth is having some kind of connection, but how deep and how full is this connection? Again, “moshtee rāz,” and again, “az door.” It again implies that there is something missing. There is something lacking. It's not the full experience. “sharhee,” “sharh” is an account of something, an explanation of something, an account of something. That's very much part of modern Farsi, “sharh,” that we talked about before. “sharh” becomes the explanation, the accounts that the moth gives an account, “sharhee,” and “bāz goft,” ‘to retell’, ‘to recount’, as in a story. The moth returned and speaks a few, a handful of mysteries about its connection with the candle. It retells this experience to the other moths present.

Leyla: Right, and I wanna clarify, the “nāghed” that we talked about in the first line, that’s not the same as this “parvāné”?

Omid: No.

Leyla: So the nāghed just is judging?

Omid: Exactly.

Leyla: And then other people are going?

Omid: Exactly, other moths are going. The nāghed is presumably one of the moths, but its role, as you say, may be judging but more about estimating and discerning and seeing how much each of the moths has had of the full experience of the candle. It's pointing that out.

Leyla: I’m thinking that the nāghed is gonna come back again and say something about this one.

Omid: I think you're thinking right.

Leyla: Okay, so then that’s our second part. So, as you can see, each one of these is so rich. We’ve been talking for thirty minutes just about these four lines!

Omid: And that's still not a lot.

Leyla: I know, I know. We just blew through it! So again, we encourage everyone to go read these four lines on your own terms. We have it defined word by word, phrase by phrase, so you can kind of come to your own understanding of what these four lines are, really sit with it, and understand it. Then we’ll be back next week, where we’ll start on the second half of these 16 lines. omid jān, is there anything else we wanna wrap up with in this lesson?

Omid: No, I'm really looking forward to seeing where this goes, and I just wanted to reiterate what you said, which is to encourage people to have their own experience with these, especially because they are of the mystical genre. Everybody that reads these will have their own take, will have their own understanding, and I think that's very, very important not to take anybody else's words for that.

Leyla: And is Attar the same as like Hafez and Rumi where people have memorized these, or is it more of something that you read?

Omid: Yeah, no, people memorizing this is not as common. Hafez is the most common in terms of verses that people know by heart, Rumi probably somewhere below, and Attar a little bit further down the list, but yes, there are people who can recite entire parables of Attar very easily, and then there are some verses in mantegh at-tayr, especially, that have very much entered kind of the broader consciousness that people are repeating as well.

Leyla: Wonderful, and memorizing always takes these to a whole different level because you’ll be in different contexts, and these words are a part of you and you can recall them, and I highly always encourage people to do that as well!

Omid: Yeah, if nothing else, also just for the music, which just is so beautiful when it reverberates in your head, as well as all the other facets.

Leyla: Definitely! Well, thank you, omid jān, and we’ll be back next week with the third part of our series on Attar’s Parable of the Moths.

Omid: Looking forward!