The Seven Valleys as a Map of the Sufi Path

Attar's seven valleys became one of the most widely used maps of spiritual progress in the whole Persian Sufi literary tradition, cited and adapted by later poets and teachers as a way of describing stages of the path even outside the specific frame of the bird allegory that first presented them. Knysh's history of Islamic mysticism situates the Conference of the Birds within the broader flowering of didactic Sufi poetry in twelfth century Persia, a period in which allegory and narrative became the preferred vehicles for teaching doctrine that earlier generations had expressed in more directly theological prose.

The poem's ending, in which the seekers discover that what they sought was in some sense already themselves, is frequently read as a poetic expression of the same non dualist intuition found in more technical form in writers such as Ibn Arabi, though Attar reaches it through story and wordplay rather than through systematic metaphysics. The work has remained continuously popular from its composition to the present, translated repeatedly into European languages and still widely read as an introduction to Persian Sufi literature for readers with no specialist background in Islamic mysticism.