Attar of Nishapur

Farid al-Din Attar (c. 1145-1221), known as Attar of Nishapur, was a Persian poet, Sufi theoretician and hagiographer born in Nishapur, in Khorasan, in what is now northeastern Iran. His nickname, Attar, means apothecary, the trade he practised in his city's bazaar. He belongs to the great tradition of Persian mystical poetry, and his work left a deep mark on later Sufism, above all on Rumi, who regarded him as a forerunner.

Little is known about his life, and much of what is repeated belongs to legend. As an apothecary he attended to many customers who confided their troubles to him, and according to tradition this experience affected him so deeply that he gave up the shop and travelled for years to Baghdad, Basra, Mecca, Damascus, Khwarizm, Turkistan and India, meeting Sufi masters. He did not earn his living from court patrons and disliked panegyric verse. His contemporaries barely mention him: Muhammad Awfi describes him as a pious Sufi and a good mystical poet, and Nasir al-Din Tusi visited him in Nishapur while still a student. Attar died in the Mongol massacre of the city in April 1221.

His output is large, although some attributions are doubtful. He wrote a Diwan of about ten thousand couplets of mystical lyric, the Mukhtar-nama, a collection of quatrains, and several narrative mathnawis: the Ilahi-nama (Book of the Divine), the Asrar-nama (Book of Secrets) and the Musibat-nama (Book of Affliction). His only prose work, the Tadhkirat al-Awliya (Memorial of the Saints), gathers biographies of Sufis and ends with al-Hallaj, whom he considered the greatest figure of Sufism.

His best known work is The Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-tayr). Without a king, the birds decide to seek the Simorgh, a mythical bird, and the hoopoe leads them across seven valleys. Many perish on the way, and only thirty reach the palace, where they discover that the Simorgh is themselves, since si morgh means thirty birds in Persian. The central idea is that spiritual fulfilment lies within, once the ego has been purified, and that the soul dissolves into the divine like a drop of water in the sea. Attar also insists on the need for a guiding master.

His influence on Persian poetry and Sufism was immense. Rumi held him in high regard and adopted the metre of his mathnawis for his own Mathnawi. Yet his stature as a mystic and storyteller was not fully appreciated until the fifteenth century.