Farid ud-Din Attar

Farid ud-Din Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr Ibrahim, known by the pen-name Attar, was a Persian poet and Sufi thinker from Nishapur, a city of Khorasan in what is now north-eastern Iran. The name attar means a seller of medicinal herbs and perfumes, in effect an apothecary, and points to his trade. Little is known of his life, much of it is mixed with legend, and sources give different dates; most often his birth is placed around 1145 and his death around 1221.

Judging by his writings and later biographies, Attar grew up in a family that valued Sufi wisdom, received a good education and kept a pharmacy of his own in Nishapur, serving a great many customers. Tradition says that the troubles people confided to him there moved him so deeply that he gave up trade for a spiritual quest; the same biographies speak of journeys to Baghdad, Mecca, Damascus, Khwarazm, Turkestan and India and of meetings with Sufi shaykhs, though this is hard to confirm.

His best-known work is the poem “The Conference of the Birds” (“Mantiq al-tayr”), traditionally dated to about 1175. The birds of the world set out to find their king, the Simurgh, cross seven valleys, from the quest to the dissolving of the self, and at the end realise that the Simurgh is themselves (in Persian si murgh means “thirty birds”). His other writings include the mathnawi poems “Ilahi-nama”, “Musibat-nama”, “Asrar-nama” and “Khusrau-nama”, a divan of ghazals, a collection of quatrains, the “Mukhtar-nama”, and his only prose book, the “Tadhkirat al-awliya” (“Memorial of the Saints”), which gathers tales and sayings of Muslim mystics.

In his own lifetime Attar seems to have been known mainly in his home town; wide fame came in the centuries after. Jalal ad-Din Rumi named him alongside Sanai as a spiritual forerunner, and tradition has it that Attar blessed the young Rumi and gave him a copy of the “Asrar-nama”.

Attar also holds a special place in Turkic literature: according to tradition, Alisher Navoi learned “The Conference of the Birds” by heart as a boy and, under its influence, wrote his poem “Lisan ut-tayr” (“The Language of the Birds”, 1498). In Uzbekistan the “Tadhkirat al-awliya” has been published in Uzbek in a translation by Mirzo Kenjabek (1997), and the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences holds more than ten manuscripts of it.

By tradition Attar was killed in the Mongol sack of Nishapur in 1221, but scholarly literature gives other dates as well, from 1220 to 1230. The poet’s mausoleum in Nishapur is associated with the name of Alisher Navoi; it was later rebuilt and was restored again in 1940.