Attar of Nishapur

← Encyclopedia

An ʿaṭṭār was a perfumer and an apothecary — a dealer in attars, the distilled essences of rose and musk, and in the dried herbs and compounded simples that a Persian town brought to a man who ground and measured behind a counter. Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār of Nishapur kept such a shop, or his father or grandfather did before him and left him the name; the chroniclers say he sat in his pharmacy taking the pulses of the sick and dispensing remedies, and that the poetry came out of that same room. The image is exact for what he became. The apothecary distills the hidden virtue out of the gross body of the plant, throwing away the husk to keep the spirit; the work he is remembered for does the same thing to the human soul, boiling away everything that is not God until what remains is an essence with no name of its own.

“The Concourse of the Birds,” Folio 11r from a manuscript of ʿAṭṭār’s Mantiq al-Tayr, painting by Habiballah of Sava (c. 1600): the hoopoe, at center right, summons the birds to seek the Sīmurgh — The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fletcher Fund, 1963), via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain / CC0)

A life mostly hidden

What can be said with confidence about ʿAṭṭār’s life is little, and the scholarship is candid about how little. He was born around 540 of the Islamic calendar — roughly 1145 or 1146 of the common era — at Nishapur, one of the great cities of Khorasan, the northeastern Iranian world that had been for three centuries a furnace of Persian learning, science, and verse. He is named by only two writers who could have known of him in his own lifetime: ʿAwfī, the anthologist, and Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī, the philosopher and astronomer. Everything richer than that — the meetings, the conversions, the deathbed scenes — comes from later tradition, and the tradition, in the manner of saints’ lives, grew lush in proportion to the silence it was filling.

The settled facts are few and they cohere. He was a pharmacist by trade and a Sufi by vocation, and the two did not pull against each other; his existence seems not to have been broken by the long travels that scattered so many of his contemporaries, but to have stayed close to Nishapur and its shop. He was learned in the lore of the path — the lives, the sayings, the technical stations of the mystics who had come before him — and he gathered that lore into prose as well as verse. And he died, by the firmest tradition, a violent death: in the spring of 618 / April 1221, when the armies of the Mongol invasion fell on Nishapur and unmade it, putting the population to the sword in one of the campaign’s most total massacres. He was an old man by then, near eighty. The poet who had spent a lifetime writing the soul’s annihilation met the literal end of his city in the same year that the wider Islamic east was broken open.

Nishapur was a city dense with such men. It was the home, a generation before, of Omar Khayyam — the astronomer-poet of the quatrains, a different temper entirely, and a man not to be confused with ʿAṭṭār though they shared the streets and the name of the place. ʿAṭṭār belonged to the city’s devotional rather than its skeptical face, and the chain of teachers he claimed and the masters he memorialized place him squarely inside the living current of Persian mysticism.

The mausoleum of ʿAṭṭār outside Nishapur, in Razavi Khorasan, Iran; the present octagonal, tile-domed structure was raised in the Timurid period over the poet’s traditional burial place — photographer via Panoramio / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Conference of the Birds

The work that holds his name is the Manṭiq al-Ṭayr — the Speech, or Conference, or Parliament, of the Birds — a narrative poem of some four and a half thousand rhyming couplets composed around 1177. It takes its frame from a slender thread in earlier literature, the assembly of birds, and stretches it into the most complete map of the mystical journey that Persian verse produced. The poem is at once a story a child could follow and a treatise on the dissolution of the self, and its genius is that it never lets the two come apart.

The birds of the world convene. They have, the hoopoe tells them — the hudhud, the bird the Qur’an names as the messenger of Solomon, who knows the speech of birds — a true king already, and they have never sought him: the Sīmurgh, the fabulous bird of Persian legend whose dwelling is Mount Qāf, the mountain that rings the edge of the world. The assembly catches fire at the news and resolves to go. Then, one by one, the birds make their excuses, and the excuses are the poem’s first great movement, for each is a portrait of a soul refusing the journey. The nightingale cannot leave the rose; he is in love with a beauty and will not give it up for the source of all beauty. The peacock remembers Eden and wants only to be readmitted to the garden, not to meet the gardener. The duck cannot leave the water, the partridge his jewels, the hawk his perch at the wrist of the king of the moment. Each clings to a good that is real and small, and the hoopoe answers each in turn, peeling the attachment away with a story. The reader who recognizes himself in the excuses has already begun the journey the birds are postponing.

“Shaikh Mahneh and the Villager,” Folio 49r, an embedded tale from the same Mantiq al-Tayr manuscript (Herat, 1487; painting often attributed to Bihzād) of the kind the hoopoe tells to answer the birds — The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fletcher Fund, 1963), via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain / CC0)

When at last they fly, the way runs through seven valleys, and the valleys are the architecture of the whole. The first is the Valley of the Quest (ṭalab), where the seeker casts off dogma and inherited certainty and enters a long labor of search with no guarantee. The second is the Valley of Love (ʿishq), where reason is burned away — love here is not sentiment but a fire that consumes the one who feels it, and the lover who counts the cost has not yet entered. The third is the Valley of Knowledge or gnosis (maʿrifa), where each traveler comes to a knowing particular to himself, and the discursive learning of the schools is found to be useless ballast. The fourth is the Valley of Detachment or self-sufficiency (istighnāʾ), where the seeker grows indifferent to possession and loss, and the whole apparatus of the world thins to nothing. The fifth is the Valley of Unity (tawḥīd), where the many are seen to be broken pieces of one thing, and number itself — the difference between this and that, between the seeker and his fellow seekers — dissolves. The sixth is the Valley of Bewilderment (ḥayra), the hardest to bear, where what was certain in the earlier valleys is unmade, and the traveler, having known and loved and unified, no longer knows whether he exists at all. And the seventh is the Valley of Poverty and Annihilation (faqr and fanāʾ), the term of the road, where the self is extinguished as a candle is extinguished at sunrise — not destroyed in despair but absorbed into a light beside which it was never a separate thing.

This fanāʾ — annihilation, the passing-away of the self in God — is the goal toward which all of Sufism bends, and ʿAṭṭār did not invent it. It is the word for the experience that Abū Yazīd al-Bisṭāmī had cried out in his ecstatic sayings two centuries before, and that the theoreticians of the path had been refining into doctrine ever since — the moment when the drop is taken back into the sea and the worshipper and the worshipped are no longer two. What ʿAṭṭār did was to give it a shape that could be flown through, valley by valley, so that the most austere idea in Islamic mysticism became a journey with a map.

The pun that is the doctrine

Of the birds that set out, the poem says, a great host falls away in the crossing — by excuse, by exhaustion, by terror, by death. Some are lost in the heat of the sun, some in the depths of the sea, some are eaten, some forget why they came. When the survivors reach the court of the Sīmurgh at last, there are thirty of them, ragged and stripped and emptied of everything they brought. And there the whole poem turns on a single word. Sī murgh, in Persian, means thirty birds. The Sīmurgh, the king they crossed the world to find, is the sī murgh — themselves. They are admitted to the presence, and in the radiance of the throne they see, reflected back, the figure of their own annihilated selves; the sought is the seeker, the king is the assembly, and the journey was a journey into a mirror.

It is the most economical statement of the mystical paradox in the literature: that the God sought outside is found to be the very self that was annihilated in the seeking, and that there is, in the end, no difference between the two. The pun is not decoration. It is the doctrine, compressed to the breaking point of language — the place where tawḥīd, the affirmation that there is no reality but the one Reality, comes out as wordplay because it can come out no other way. Edward FitzGerald, who carried a version of the poem into English in the nineteenth century, rendered the moment of recognition as the Thirty standing before the throne and beholding the figure of themselves, until “They That, That They: Another, yet the Same: / Dividual, yet One” — the grammar itself collapsing under the weight of an identity that is also a difference. The voice from the throne tells them that pilgrim and pilgrimage and road were all one thing, that their arrival was only the One arriving at its own door.

The frame is deliberately not a doctrine of self-divinization, and the tradition has been careful on the point. The annihilated self does not become God; it discovers that its separateness was the illusion, and in passing away it is taken up into a Reality that was always the only one there. The bewilderment of the sixth valley guards against the easy version — the traveler does not graduate into mastery but into a not-knowing deeper than any knowledge — and the poverty of the seventh is real poverty, the loss of everything, including the satisfaction of having arrived.

The chain of poets

ʿAṭṭār did not stand alone, and he knew exactly whose work he was extending. The Persian mystical masnavi — the long didactic poem in rhyming couplets that folds sermon and parable and the soul’s instruction into a single narrative — had been opened a generation before him by Sanāʾī of Ghazna, the court poet who abandoned panegyric for the religious life and composed the Ḥadīqat al-Ḥaqīqa, the Walled Garden of Truth, the first of the line. Sanāʾī gave the form its purpose; ʿAṭṭār gave it the perfected allegory of the journey. And after him came Rūmī, in thirteenth-century Anatolia, whose vast Masnavī would take up the same inheritance and become the summit of the whole tradition — and who named his debt plainly. In a couplet long quoted in the tradition, Rūmī called ʿAṭṭār the soul of the work and Sanāʾī its two eyes, and placed himself behind them both, a follower who came after in their track. The order that crystallized around Rūmī’s memory, the Mevlevi whirling dervishes, would carry that lineage of devotion forward in ritual and music; but the poetic descent from Sanāʾī through ʿAṭṭār to Rūmī is the spine of Persian poetic mysticism, and ʿAṭṭār is its middle term, the one who turned the genre into a cartography of the inner life.

A hagiographic story, repeated by many and accepted by few of the careful, has the two men meet. As the young Rūmī’s family fled west ahead of the same Mongols who would one day kill ʿAṭṭār, the household is said to have passed through Nishapur, where the aged poet recognized the boy’s spiritual stature and gave him a copy of his Asrār-nāma, the Book of Secrets. Whether or not the meeting happened, the gift is a fair emblem of the real transmission: the older poet’s books did pass to the younger, and Rūmī’s verse is steeped in them.

The condition the poem maps — the burning love, the self-loss, the annihilation in the Beloved — runs through the whole company of the Sufi masters and is not ʿAṭṭār’s private possession. It is the ecstasy that the early ascetics sought and the sober theologians like al-Ghazālī tried to give a defensible account of; it is the same fire, differently tended, in every figure who has spoken of losing the self in the divine. ʿAṭṭār’s distinction is not the experience but the form — the seven valleys, the failing birds, the mirror at the end — by which he made the most interior of all journeys legible to anyone who could follow a tale.

The other works and the lives of the saints

The Manṭiq al-Ṭayr is the most celebrated of ʿAṭṭār’s poems but not the only great one. His core of accepted works includes a sequence of long masnavis that work the same vein from different angles: the Ilāhī-nāma, the Book of God, in which a king’s six sons each desire a worldly thing and are taught the spiritual meaning hidden inside each desire; the Muṣībat-nāma, the Book of Affliction, in which a wayfaring soul travels through the whole of creation in search of God and is sent at last back into itself; the Asrār-nāma, the Book of Secrets; and the Mukhtār-nāma, a thematically arranged collection of his quatrains. Through all of them runs the same conviction — that the world is a tissue of signs, each pointing past itself, and that the seeker’s task is to read through the sign to the thing signified and then to vanish into it.

“Funeral Procession,” Folio 35r from the Mantiq al-Tayr manuscript (calligraphy by Sultan ʿAlī al-Mashhadī, Herat, 1487): a son mourns his father, one of the death-themed parables that recur across ʿAṭṭār’s poems — The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Fletcher Fund, 1963), via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain / CC0)

His one great prose work stands somewhat apart and has had a life of its own. The Tadhkirat al-Awliyāʾ, the Memorial of the Saints, is a collection of biographies and, above all, sayings of the early Sufi masters — the only source for much of what is known, or told, of figures like al-Bisṭāmī and the martyrs and ecstatics of the first centuries of the path. It is hagiography and reads as hagiography: the lives are shaped to edify, the miracles are abundant, the chronology is loose. But it preserved the words of the masters for everyone who came after, and as a repository of the sayings on which later Sufism built its self-understanding it is nearly indispensable, whatever its value as documentary biography.

The two ʿAṭṭārs and the textual problem

A reader who goes looking for ʿAṭṭār’s complete works runs immediately into a difficulty that modern scholarship has made central. An enormous number of poems circulated under his name — far more than one long life could have produced, and many of them in a theology and a manner that do not match the secure works at all. The German Orientalist Hellmut Ritter, whose study of ʿAṭṭār’s narrative art remains the foundation of the field, first sorted the corpus and argued that the works ascribed to him fall into distinct groups that cannot be the product of one hand; the later Iranian scholarship, above all the editions and arguments of Moḥammad-Reżā Shafīʿī-Kadkanī, has refined the sorting and defended a relatively small authentic core against a large body of later, spuriously attributed verse. The “two ʿAṭṭārs” problem — the genuine poet of Nishapur and the pseudo-ʿAṭṭār to whom centuries of devotees attached their own productions — is now a fixed feature of the study of his work, and the dating, the canon, and even some of the biography remain matters the specialists continue to argue.

The texts and the scholarship

The European life of the Manṭiq al-Ṭayr began with Garcin de Tassy, who published the Persian text in 1857 and a French prose translation in 1863 as Mantic Uttaïr — the first full European rendering, and still the gateway through which the poem entered Western letters. Edward FitzGerald, better known for the Rubáiyát of his fellow Nishapuri Khayyam, made a freer English version, the “Bird-Parliament,” drafted in the 1850s and first printed posthumously in 1889 in the Letters and Literary Remains edited by W. Aldis Wright; it compresses and reshapes the original but renders the climactic recognition of the Thirty with real force, and it is the text in which most early English readers met the poem. The early scholarly framing came through Edward G. Browne’s A Literary History of Persia (vol. II, 1906) and Reynold A. Nicholson’s surveys of Islamic mysticism, which placed ʿAṭṭār in the Persian apophatic line beside Sanāʾī and Rūmī. The authoritative modern reference is B. Reinert’s article in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, which assembles what the sources actually allow to be said and is severe about the rest; the indispensable monograph is Ritter’s Das Meer der Seele (1955), available in English as The Ocean of the Soul (Brill, 2003).

The poem’s last word is its own structure, and it does not need a moral appended. The hoopoe gathered an assembly to seek a king on a mountain at the edge of the world, and the survivors of the road found, in the mirror of the throne, that the king was the assembly and the mountain was the heart — that sī murgh and Sīmurgh were one word the whole time, and that the only distance ever crossed was the distance from the self to the self stripped bare. The remedy the apothecary compounded out of bird-fable and seven valleys is the oldest one in the pharmacopoeia of the path: that to find what is sought, the seeker must be the thing that disappears.

→ In the library: ʿAttār — Bird-Parliament (Mantiq al-Tayr), trans. FitzGerald, 1889 · al-Hujwīrī — The Kashf al-Maḥjúb (trans. Nicholson, 1911)

→ Related: Sufism · Islamic Sufism · Persian Poetic Mysticism · Rumi · Al Ghazali · Abu Yazid Al Bistami · Al Hujwiri · Suhrawardi · Mevlevi Order Mevleviyya Whirling Dervishes · Ecstasy · Apophatic Theology · Omar Khayyam · Islam · Qur An · Islamic Golden Age