Not One Single Verse Without a Mystical Coloring

By Ladan M. Sadeghioon - CHN Cultural Heritage News - Tehran, Iran; Saturday, April 14, 2007

Today, concurrent with commemoration day of Farid al- Din Attar Neishaburi, well known Persian poet and philosopher, a special ceremony was held in city of Neishabur, Khorasan Razavi province with attendance of intellectuals, academic members, authors, students, etc. The ceremony inaugurated with message of Saffar Harandi, Iran’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

Farid al-Din Attar, Persian great poet, was the principal Muslim mystical poet and writer in the second half of the 12th century. Attar works were the inspiration of Rumi and many other mystic poets. Attar along with Sanaie, were two of the greatest influences on Rumi in his Sufi views. Rumi has mentioned both of them with the highest esteem several times in his poetry. Jalal al-Din Rumi praises Attar as such: “Attar roamed the seven cities of love, We are still just in one alley”.

Attar is best known for his often-translated masterpiece Mantiq al-tayr, literally means, The Conference of the Birds, is still considered to be the best example of Sufism poetry in Persian language after Rumi’s verses. Distinguished for his provocative and radical theology of love, many lines of Attar’s poems and lyrics are cited independently as maxims in their own right. These paradoxical statements are still known by heart and sung by minstrels throughout Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and wherever Persian is spoken or understood, such as in the lands of the Indo-Pakistani Subcontinent.

Attar composed at least 45,000 couplets and many brilliant prose works in six important works of poetry and one major prose work. His great prose work comprises the monumental compendium in Persian of biographies of famous Sufis, is called Tadhkirat al-awliya, or Memoirs of the Saints. While Asrar Nameh, or the Book of Mysteries which strings together a series of unconnected episodic stories, is [known as] Attar’s least known poems, Mantiq al-tayr or the Conference of Birds, is [known as] his most famous epic poem, which is consecrated to the tale of the spiritual quest of thirty birds to find their supreme sovereign, the Simurgh. This work was modeled on the Treatise on the Birds composed half a century earlier by another Sufi master, Ahmad Ghazali (d. 1126 CE), founder of the ‘school of love’ in Sufism. This epic masterpiece (to which five essays in chapter two of the present volume are devoted) has also enjoyed several musical and theatrical adaptations in the West, while its stories are common subjects of illustration in Persian miniature painting.

Attar’s Book of Adversity (Musibat-nameh) recounts the Sufi path in other terms, following the voyage of the contemplative wayfarer or ‘Pilgrim of Thought’ (salik-i fikrat) through the mineral, vegetable, animal, human, and angelic realms.

Attar’s Divine Book (Ilahi-nameh) relates the story of a king who asks his six sons what they most desire. They all ask for worldly things, and the king exposes their vanity in a series of anecdotes. The Book of Selections (Mukhtar-namah) is a collection of over 2,000 quatrains (ruba‘i) arranged in 50 chapters according to various mystical themes, and his Collected Poems (Diwan) contains some 10,000 couplets which are notable for their depiction of visionary landscapes and heart-rending evocations of the agonies and ecstasies of the via mystic. These poems are notable not only for their thematic unity, with usually just one mystical idea, or a series of related concepts from first verse to last line being elaborated progressively, but also for their esoteric hermeticism and unconventional religious values. The attribution of the Book of Khusraw (Khusraw-namah, a romance of the love between a Byzantine princess and a Persian prince, with almost no mystical content) to the poet has been rejected, on convincing stylistic, linguistic and historical grounds, as spurious.

Attar’s works had such an impact on both the Sufi community and the literate public at large that his fame soared soon after his death. He became rapidly imitated, so that today there are some twenty-three works falsely attributed to ‘Attar, proven by modern scholars to be spurious or of doubtful authenticity. If we take merely the works that are unquestionably his, comprising a good 45,000 lines, the achievement is monumental.

However, the most important aspect of Attar’s thought lies in the fact that all of his works are devoted to Sufism (tasawuf) and throughout all of his genuine collected works, there does not exist even one single verse without a mystical coloring; in fact, Attar dedicated his entire literary existence to Sufism. The wide range of papers included in this collection is itself testimony to the stature of Attar as one of the greatest figures in the glorious tradition of Persian Sufi poetry. Bringing together for the first time the work of both senior and younger scholars from three continents, the volume offers a stimulating overview of Attar and his extraordinarily varied literary creations from a whole series of different viewpoints, which build on the findings of earlier scholarship to offer many novel perspectives.

In 2002 an international conference entitled Farid al Din Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition was held by the Iran Heritage Foundation in collaboration with the Center of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and the University of London. The conference, which was convened by Dr. Leonard Lewisohn, author, translator and researcher in the area of Islamic studies and a specialist in Persian language and Sufi literature, and Christopher Shackle, Professor of Modern Language of South Asia at SOAS at University of London was the centerpiece of a number of musical, poetic and artistic events in London to celebrate Persian mysticism and the literary contributions of Farid al-Din Attar.

Farid al-Din Attar was born in Nishapur, Iranian Khorasan province. There is disagreement over the exact dates of his birth and death but several sources confirm that he lived almost 100 years. Different stories are told about the death of Attar. One common story is as follow: He was captured by a Mongol. One day someone came along and offered a thousand pieces of silver for him. Attar told the Mongol not to sell him for that price since the price was not right. The Mongol accepted Attar’s words and did not sell him. Later someone else comes along and offers a sack of straw for him. Attar counsels the Mongol to sell him because that is how much he is worth. The Mongol soldier becomes very angry and cuts off Attar’s head so he died to teach a lesson.

Attar’s tomb in Nishapur, attracted a large number of tourists every year who pay visit to Nishapur historic city to pay their attribute to this great Persian poet and writer.

Source: The Institute of Islamic Studies, *Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight* by Dr. Leonard Lewisohn and Professor Christopher Shackle .

[picture: Nishapur, Tomb of Attar]