The Seven Valleys of the Spiritual Path

The first valley is the Valley of the Quest — talab. To enter it is to recognise that what one has pursued until now — wealth, status, knowledge, pleasure — has not been the true object of desire. The seeker must abandon these false goals and set out in earnest toward something they cannot yet name or see. This is not merely a change of goal but a transformation of the structure of desire itself: from the scattered wanting of many things to the focused, burning need for one. The valley of quest is painful because it involves the destruction of everything in which the self has been invested.

The second valley is Love — ishq — where reason is dethroned and the lover burns with a fire that destroys the distinction between what is sought and what is feared. The third is the Valley of Knowledge — ma'rifa — where intellectual learning dissolves into direct gnosis, the knowing that comes through being rather than through study. The fourth is Detachment — istigna — the relinquishment of every attachment, including the attachment to spiritual attainment. Each valley deepens the abandonment required of the previous one: what was gained must be given up; what was achieved must be transcended.

The fifth valley is Unity — tawhid — where the multiplicity of the world is seen as one. The sixth is Bewilderment — hayra — a state beyond both knowledge and ignorance, in which the mind is stilled by the incomprehensibility of what it has encountered. The seventh and final valley is Annihilation and Death — fana wa faqr — the complete extinction of the self. Only thirty birds, out of the thousands that set out, survive to reach this valley; and what they find there reveals the nature of the journey's end. The seven valleys are not stages that can be skipped or completed once and done; they are modes of the one movement of return.

The seven valleys framework draws on and systematises earlier Sufi accounts of the spiritual path, including those of al-Qushayri and al-Ghazali. Attar's arrangement — Quest, Love, Knowledge, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, Annihilation — became the standard framework in Persian Sufi literature.