The perfumer of Nishapur
Farid ud-Din Attar earned his living as an apothecary, which is where his name comes from: an attar is a maker of perfumes and remedies. According to the old accounts he saw patients and wrote his poetry in the same shop, and he is regarded as one of the three great masters of Persian Sufi poetry, with Sanai and Rumi.
Tradition holds that the young Rumi, travelling with his family through Nishapur, was given a copy of Attar’s book by the poet himself.
The Conference of the Birds
The Conference of the Birds is a long poem about a gathering of all the birds of the world, who decide to find their king, the Simorgh, who lives far away beyond the mountains. The hoopoe leads them, and warns them of seven valleys they must cross, each harder than the last. Most of the birds give up along the way, and only thirty arrive.
There they find that the Simorgh is nothing other than themselves, for in Persian si morgh means “thirty birds.” Each bird sees its own face mirrored in the great bird’s, and the poem ends with the thought that the seeker and the sought are one.
Nishapur
Attar is buried in Nishapur, not far from the tomb of Omar Khayyam. According to tradition he was killed when the Mongols took the city in the early 13th century.
