Farid al-Din Attar

Attar's best known poem opens with an assembly. The birds of the world gather, discover that they have no king, and are told by the hoopoe, who knows the way because Solomon sent her, that they do have one: the Simurgh, who lives beyond seven valleys on a mountain at the edge of the world. The birds are enthusiastic until they learn what the journey costs, and then each produces an excuse. The nightingale cannot leave the rose. The parrot wants only immortality. The peacock remembers paradise and wants it back rather than its owner.

The hoopoe answers each in turn with a story, and this is the poem's actual method: a frame carrying dozens of short tales, some pious, some comic, some brutal. Those who set out cross the valleys of quest, love, knowledge, detachment, unity, bewilderment and finally poverty and annihilation, and almost all of them die on the way, of thirst, of fear, of exhaustion.

Thirty birds arrive. What they find, when they are finally admitted, is a mirror, and in Persian the pun does the theology: si murgh means thirty birds, and the Simurgh they have crossed the world to reach turns out to be themselves, seen truly. It is a resolution that manages to state the doctrine of annihilation and subsistence without a line of technical vocabulary, and it is why the poem has been translated more often than anything else Attar wrote.

Attar means druggist or perfumer, and it was his trade rather than a title. He kept a pharmacy in Nishapur, and the tradition says he attended to a very large number of patients, which he described afterwards as the education that mattered. He does not appear to have had a Sufi master in the ordinary sense; he read, and he collected.

What he collected became the Tadhkirat al-Awliya, the Memorial of the Saints, a prose work of some ninety odd lives of the early Sufis. It is not a critical history and does not pretend to be. It is the channel through which most of what is popularly known about Rabia, about Bayazid and about al-Hallaj reached later readers, and for several of those figures it is effectively the earliest connected account in existence, written three or four centuries after them. Any modern account of the early tradition has to use it and has to say what it is.

His own corpus is a problem of the same kind in reverse. A large number of works circulated under his name, and several long attributed to him have since been assigned to other poets, so that the boundary of what he actually wrote has moved considerably. He is said to have died in the Mongol sack of Nishapur in 1221, an end which suits the poetry rather too neatly and which the sources report without corroborating.