Attar of Nishapur

Farid al-Din Attar (the name ʿAttar means "druggist" or "perfumer") was a Persian poet and Sufi — a Muslim mystic — from Nishapur in Khurasan, in what is now northeastern Iran. He is counted among the greatest narrative poets of the Persian Sufi tradition. Reliable detail about his life is scarce, and his biography was heavily embroidered by later tradition. His birth is variously placed between roughly 1118 and 1146 (commonly given c. 1145), and his death between 1221 and about 1230; the widely repeated date of c. 1221 ties his death to the Mongol sack of Nishapur in April 1221, which is reported rather than firmly documented.

From his own writing it is accepted that he practised as an apothecary in Nishapur, attending many patients — a calling that plausibly shaped his interest in healing and the soul. Popular accounts describe sweeping youthful journeys to Mecca, Baghdad, Damascus, India and Central Asia, but the leading modern scholarship (Reinert, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica) holds that his settled life as a pharmacist and Sufi was probably never interrupted by such travels; these are best read as later legend.

His enduring fame rests on his poetry — above all Mantiq al-Tayr ("The Conference of the Birds"), an allegory of birds seeking their king — and on Tadhkirat al-Awliya ("Memorial of the Saints"), his prose lives of earlier Sufis. Scholars note he was little known as a poet in his lifetime; his stature, and his influence on later poets such as Rumi, was recognised mainly from the 15th century onward.