Attar of Nishapur
Iranian poet and mystic (c. 1145–1221) from Nishapur, author of the Conference of the Birds (Mantiq al-Tayr) and a fountainhead of Persian mystical literature.
Read in context →At a glance
- Field
- Mystical poetry, allegory, hagiography
- Era
- Pre-Mongol (Khwarazmshah) era
- Key work
- Mantiq al-Tayr; Tadhkirat al-Awliya
- Birthplace
- Nishapur, Khorasan
Biography
Farid al-Din Abu Hamid Muhammad Attar of Nishapur (c. 1145–1221 CE) was a great Iranian poet and mystic from Nishapur in Khorasan. The byname 'Attar' refers to his trade as a pharmacist or perfumer; he is said to have tended people in his apothecary while cultivating mystical poetry and wisdom. His most famous work is the Mantiq al-Tayr (Conference of the Birds), an allegorical poem in which a flock of birds led by the hoopoe seeks the Simurgh (king of birds) across seven arduous valleys, only to discover at the end that they themselves are 'si murgh' (thirty birds) — a profound emblem of the Sufi path and annihilation in the Divine. Attar produced other major works such as the Elahi-nama, the Mosibat-nama, and especially the Tadhkirat al-Awliya, the first Persian prose hagiography of the mystics, and exerted a deep influence on Rumi and the later mystical tradition. A contested point is that the details of his life, the precise list of his works, and the date of his death are uncertain; tradition holds he was killed in the Mongol massacre at Nishapur (c. 1221), but this account is not certain, and the authenticity of several works attributed to him is also questioned by scholars.
Quotes & narrations
«When those thirty birds (si murgh) looked, at once — without doubt — these thirty birds were that Simurgh.»
Related entities
Sources
- Encyclopaedia Iranica, "ʿAṭṭār, Farīd-al-Dīn"
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār"
- Hellmut Ritter, The Ocean of the Soul