113 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 D. Quintern, D. Verducci (eds.), Eco-Imagination towards a Sustainable Future, Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-67659-8_9 Chapter 9 Review of the Contemporary Mystical Debate on Simorgh’s Symbiotics Ebrahim Azadegan, Maryam Faramand, and Hossein Tahmaseb Kazemi Abstract About 150 years ago, two famous Iranian mystic and jurisprudent Najaf seminary people debated the interpretation of one of the poems of Attar Nishabouri. In this chapter, we try to outline the key points of the dispute between these two Hercules of contemporary Islamic mysticism and then try to extract out of this debate a conception of the relation between the unity of God and the manifold and plurality in His creatures to introduce a type of symbiotic perspective of a man–God relationship. To explain the social and even political role of human beings in the journey toward the ethical community, we appeal to the metaphor of the mystical journey from thirty birds [si murgh] toward unified Simurgh. If every person in society does her role perfectly, they will reach the Qaaf of a good and unified society. Keywords Simurgh · Islamic mysticism · Essence of God · Existence · Unity · Moral community E. Azadegan (*) Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran e-mail: azadegan@sharif.edu M. Faramand Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran Department of History of Science, Encyclopedia Islamica Foundation, Tehran, Iran e-mail: m.farahmand@sharif.edu H. T. Kazemi University of Religions and Denominations, Qum, Iran e-mail: h.t.kazemi@urd.ac.ir