Farid al-Din Attar فريد الدين العطار

One of the great Persian Sufi poets, Farid al-Din Attar was born in Nishapur around 537 AH / 1145 CE and died there around 618 AH / 1221 CE, killed during the Mongol sack of the city at an advanced age. He earned his living as an apothecary and pharmacist, the trade that gave him his pen name "Attar," the perfumer or druggist, and his shop is said to have brought him into contact with the sufferings and stories that fill his verse. A Sunni Muslim drawn from childhood to the Sufis, their sayings, and their way of life, he poured that devotion into poems that became cornerstones of the Persian mystical tradition.

He is best remembered for Mantiq al-Tayr, "The Conference of the Birds," an allegory in which the birds of the world set out under the hoopoe's guidance to seek the mythical Simurgh, only to discover the Divine reflected in themselves. His prose Tadhkirat al-Awliyaʾ, "Memorial of the Saints," gathers the lives and sayings of earlier Sufi masters, while the Ilahi-nama, Asrar-nama, and Musibat-nama extend his vision in further verse. Attar's influence on later Sufism was immense: Rumi honored him as a forerunner who had already roamed the seven cities of love, and generations of seekers have read him as a guide for the soul.