by Syed Ahfadul Mujtaba
A comparative exploration of Sartre, Attar, and Bulleh Shah, examining whether humans create God to escape freedom, ego, and loneliness.
Jean-Paul Sartre opens his novel Nausea not with a grand entrance but with a sickness, a creeping, formless dread that settles over his protagonist, Roquentin, the moment he perceives existence as raw, unjustified, and terrifyingly without purpose. There is no God who designed the world. There is no essence planted in man before his birth. There is only existence, naked, absurd, and free.
This is the cornerstone of Sartrean Existentialism: existence precedes essence. The chair was designed before it was made. But man appears, and only then, through his choices, makes himself into something. God, in this framework, is not a creator but a consolation. A story man tells himself to escape the vertigo of his own radical freedom. Man did not emerge from God’s hands. Rather, man fashioned God from his own anxiety.
This is a deeply modern, Western, and largely atheistic insight. And yet, centuries before Sartre was scribbling away in Parisian cafés, poets in Persia and Punjab were already circling the same fire, from the inside.
The Birds Who Were Already the King
Fariduddin Attar’s Mantiq ut-Tair, The Conference of the Birds, is, on its surface, a story of a spiritual quest. The birds of the world decide to seek their true king, the Simorgh, who lives beyond the seven valleys of Love, Reason, Gnosis, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, and Annihilation. Most birds make excuses, turn back, or die somewhere along the way. Only thirty survive to complete the journey.
And when they finally arrive? They gaze into the divine mirror and see themselves. Simorgh in Persian means “thirty birds.” They are the Simorgh. The king they spent everything searching for was never separate from the seekers. The destination had been woven into the walkers all along.
Attar is not saying God does not exist. He is saying something far more unsettling: the God you imagined as separate from yourself was a projection, a fiction of your own making. The real divine is not reached by submitting to an external authority but by annihilating the ego that kept you from recognising what was already there.
Sheikh San’an and the Pig Pen of the Ego
Within The Conference of the Birds, Attar embeds the devastating parable of Sheikh San’an, a scholar of fifty years, a man with five hundred devoted disciples, a pilgrim who had made the Hajj four times. By every external measure, a saint.
Then he falls in love with a Christian girl in Rome. He abandons his prayers, drinks wine, worships idols, and, most scandalously of all, tends her pigs.
What is Attar doing here? He is demolishing the constructed God.
Sheikh San’an’s piety was genuine, but it was his own, built on ego, upheld by reputation, fed by the admiration of followers. It was a God shaped in his own image: orderly, respectable, rule-following. When love arrived, raw, irrational, and annihilating, that carefully assembled God crumbled. The Sheikh had to tend pigs precisely because his inner swine had never once been faced. His God had always been a mirror of his own vanity.
And this, Attar insists, is not a failure. It is the necessary prerequisite for any real transformation. The Sheikh eventually returns, but not as he was. He comes back completely broken open.
Sheikh San’an Speaks: The Monologue of Return
What follows is an original Urdu poem by this author imagining Sheikh San’an’s interior monologue at his moment of reckoning, the instant he recognises that every idol he ever worshipped, including the God he himself constructed, was carved from his own loneliness.
میں جو تنہا یوں میں بھٹکتا تھا
اپنے رب کی تلاش میں ہر دم
خود ہی خود سے جفا کر بیٹھا
ہر صنم کو خدا سمجھ بیٹھا
میری تنہایاں کے آزر نے
پھر تراشا ایک رب کریم
لگی مجھے انعام
تیری آمد پہ اب میں حیراں ہوں
وہ بصارت، خدا کا وہ انعام
چھن گیا مجھ سے کس گناہ کے عوض
میں نے سوچا تھا کہ اسکی راہوں میں
پا ہی لونگا میں اپنا رب کریم
(Translation)
I wandered alone, always searching for my Lord at every moment.
I did an injustice to myself.
I mistook every idol for God.
The idol-maker of my loneliness
carved for me yet another merciful Lord.
It felt like a gift.
And now, at your arrival, I stand astonished.
That vision, that gift of God,
taken from me—for what sin?
I had thought that on His path
I would surely find my merciful Lord.
The poem’s whole weight rests on one word: آزر, the idol-carver. In Islamic tradition, Azar was the father of Prophet Ibrahim, the man who spent his life carving idols for others. Bulleh Shah used this image too. But here the poet turns it completely inward: it is not some external pagan artisan who makes false gods. It is loneliness itself that picks up the chisel. We carve our gods from our own emptiness. And then we stand astonished when the real finally arrives.
Bulleh Shah and the Pig Herder Within
Bulleh Shah, the great 18th-century Punjabi Sufi poet, knew Attar’s story well, and took it further. Closer to the bone, deeper into the Punjabi soil.
In one of his kafis, he captures the entire tragedy in a single devastating line:
شیخ سنانوں خوک چرائیو
(Sheikh Sinanon khok charaio)
“Sheikh San’an was made to tend pigs.”
The word سنانوں names him in full, and with full weight. And چرائیو—”was made to”—reminds us this was not his choice. Love itself was the force that drove him there. The ego does not surrender willingly. It is made to.
Bulleh Shah is reaching for the most transgressive image available in his world: a revered Muslim scholar reduced to tending the most ritually impure of animals, not as condemnation but as revelation. The pig-herding is the moment of truth. It is what happens when the false God, the God of reputation, ritual, and religious performance, is finally stripped away.
Bulleh Shah believed that man and God are inseparable, that the Beloved is not somewhere outside the self. But to truly know this, the self must first be emptied of all its pretensions. The Sheikh tending pigs is the self at its most naked, stripped of titles, stripped of followers, stripped of the God it constructed to feel safe.
Bulleh Shah asks: You have read a thousand books, but have you ever read yourself? You rush to mosques and temples, but have you ever tried to enter yourself? The mosque, the temple, the prayer mat, these are not wrong in themselves. They become wrong the moment they substitute for genuine self-confrontation.
Three Thinkers, One Wound
What connects Sartre, Attar, and Bulleh Shah is a shared diagnosis of a deeply human wound: we manufacture the divine to avoid the terror of our own depth.
Sartre’s man invents God to escape freedom. Attar’s Sheikh invents a God of respectability to avoid love. Bulleh Shah’s mystic performs religion to avoid the self.
And the cure in all three? A confrontation with nakedness.
For Sartre, it is the nausea itself, the unbearable lightness of groundless existence that, when faced honestly, becomes the very foundation of authentic freedom. For Attar, it is the annihilation at the end of the seven valleys, fana, the dissolution of self into the Real. For Bulleh Shah, it is the pig pen, the willingness to become scandalous, low, and broken in the eyes of the world, to become honest before God, finally.
The difference lies in what remains after stripping.
Sartre’s man emerges alone, radically free, radically responsible, with no divine company. The nausea does not resolve into joy. It resolves into the cold dignity of authentic choice.
Attar’s birds emerge as the Simorgh; the divine was always with them, and now at last they know it. Annihilation is not emptiness; it is union.
For Bulleh Shah, love is the very essence of God, a fire lit in the heart of man, a yearning for return, felt most sharply at the moment the individual self-separates from the divine. The pig pen is not the end of the story. It is the turning point. The constructed God dies so the real one can finally be felt.
The God Worth Having
A question rises naturally from all three traditions: is the God we made worth destroying?
Sartre would say: destroy it entirely and stand in the open air of freedom.
Attar would say: destroy the image and discover what the image was always pointing toward.
Bulleh Shah would say: let love do the destroying, because love alone knows what to keep.
Bulleh Shah counsels this: be one with the only Almighty Creator, leave behind all the complicated structures you have built to reach Him, free yourself from fear, make your heart grand, and only then will you begin to understand.
This is perhaps the most radical statement of all. It does not say God does not exist. It says: the God you built in your imagination, with your rituals and your reputations and your fear, that God must go. Not because there is nothing beyond, but because that very construction is standing between you and whatever is actually there.
Sartre called the man who hides behind God a man of bad faith. Attar called him a bird who refused to fly. Bulleh Shah, more gently and more devastatingly, called him a Sheikh tending pigs, not yet knowing that the pig pen was the beginning of his real journey home.
From the boulevards of Paris to the valleys of Persian mysticism to the dusty lanes of Punjab, the same question echoes across centuries: Who made whom? And the honest answer, from all three, is the same, before you can know God, you must first undo the one you invented.
(The author, after retiring as IGP in Jammu and Kashmir Police, was a member of the Jammu and Kashmir Public Service Commission. Ideas are personal.)
