Farid ud-Din Attar (d. approx. 1220)

Khorasanian poet and druggist Farid ud-Din Attar was a Muslim pietist and author of the Persian classic The Conference of the Birds (Manteq at-Tair)--an extended allegory of life understood as a tariqa or path of disciplined longing. The goal of this "path" is purification: one is doused in the flames of passion (ishq) until the impediments to love (mahabba) are burned away. What remains is what is made indistinguishable from what ought to be. One may think of the "path" as an Islamic tantra--but unburdened of the prurience associated with popular (mis-)understandings of Hindu or Buddhist practices that go by that name.

In the words of his most accomplished translators to date (Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis), Attar's poem is "...continually interesting and amusing, [with] moments of great psychological insight, humour and narrative suspense...[its over 4,500 lines transform] belief into poetry, much in the way that [the poems of] Milton or Dante [would later do]" (Attar, Conference of the Birds, Penguin Classics, 1984, p. 15).

Attar "is said to have spent much of his childhood being educated at the theological school attached to the shrine of Imam Reza at Mashhad (the largest town in north-eastern Iran and a major centre of pilgrimage), and later to have travelled to Rey (the ancient Raghes, near modern Tehran), Egypt, Damascus, Mecca, Turkestan (southern Russia) and India. Such itineraries are common in the lives of Persian poets of [his] period, and it was clearly usual for them, like their counterparts in medieval Europe, the troubadours and wandering scholars, to travel from place to place in search of knowledge or patronage or both.



Attar's travels seem to have been undertaken more in the pursuit of knowledge than patronage; he boasted that he had never sought a king's favour or stooped to writing a panegyric (this alone would make him worthy of note among Persian poets). Though The Conference of the Birds is about the search for an ideal, spiritual king, Attar obviously had a low opinion of most earthly rulers; he usually presents their behavior as capricious and cruel, and at one point in the poem he specifically says it is best to have nothing to do with them" (ibid., pp. 9-10).