The hoopoe's speech is directed not only to the fictive birds, but also to ʿAttar's flesh-and-blood readers. The poem's imagined reception, on the part of its avian audience, functions as both an invitation and a promise to its actual readers: like the birds, they should be moved by this speech to reform and thereby launched on the path towards proximity with God. Certainly, not all readers will accept ʿAttar's reflexive portrayal of his own discourse's rhetorical power, and even among those who do and answer his call to turn towards piety, spiritual progress is by no means guaranteed. (Among the birds, after all, only thirty make it to the Simorgh.) Still, the frame-tale suggests that this speech has special transformative potential, and amenable readers are urged to receive it accordingly: to open themselves up to ʿAttar's exhortations and allow themselves to be motivated, persuaded and transformed thereby.

This invitation depends in part on a series of reflexive elisions in which readers (and their textual encounter with the poem) are conflated with the birds (and their aural audition of the hoopoe). A literary text, of course, differs from an oral sermon in myriad ways, but the Conference of the Birds routinely blurs the boundaries between them. Readers are encouraged to identify with the birds, while ʿAttar takes the hoopoe as his avatar: the bird–hoopoe relationship thus becomes the narrative embodiment of, and a prescriptive model for, readers’ relationship with his teaching persona. In this way, the events of the frame-tale are projected onto the wider rhetorical work of the text.

The present chapter examines these elisions as tools of authorial control; it shows how ʿAttar imagines and reflexively portrays his readers through the frame-tale and embedded anecdotes and in order to guide and condition their encounter with the poem. It begins with the Conference of the Birds’ curious mixture of textuality and fictive orality. By virtue of the frame-tale, the poem – a literary text in the masnavi form – is imagined as a vicarious oral homiletic assembly, justifying the inclusion of certain kinds of stories and providing a particular context for their interpretation. Even more importantly, the frame-tale draws on oral instruction's epistemic and spiritual privilege – especially in a sufi context – which it appropriates for a literary text.