Attar of Nishapur

Persian Sufi poet (c. 1145 – c. 1221)

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Source-basedRising

Lived 1145–1221, aged 76

WritersWriter / Author

Wikipedia
55 languages
Cross-language footprint
Era
1145–1221
Aged 76

Summary

Updated 2026-06-09

A 12th-century Persian apothecary whose allegorical poetry became the blueprint for Islamic mysticism — his influence on Rumi alone secured his place, but it's The Conference of the Birds, a poem about thirty birds seeking God, that still gets taught in philosophy seminars eight centuries later.

Biography

About

Faridoddin Abu Hamed Mohammad worked as an apothecary in Nishapur around 1145, a trade that gave him his pen name Attar. He turned to writing lyrical and long philosophical poems rooted in Sufi mysticism, alongside a prose collection of biographies and sayings of Muslim mystics. The Conference of the Birds and Book of the Divine established him as a theoretician whose allegorical method would shape Persian poetry for generations. His work reached Rumi, who carried the mystical tradition forward. Attar died around 1221, leaving a body of writing that remains central to the study of Sufism.

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Attar of Nishapur

Attar of Nishapur

saidundated

I shall grasp the soul's skirt with my hand and stamp on the world's head with my foot.

— Translated by Bernard Lewis, Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (2001), p. 119

Attar of Nishapur

saidundated

The seaWill be a seaWhatever the drop's philosophy.

— Reported in Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis (2003), p. 285

Attar of Nishapur

saidundated

Your face is neither infinite nor ephemeral. You can never see your own face,only a reflection, not the face itself.

— "Looking For Your Own Face", translated by Coleman Barks, The Hand of Poetry: Five Mystic Poets of Persia (1993)

Attar of Nishapur

saidundated

Don't be dead or asleep or awake. Don't be anything. What you most want,what you travel around wishing to find,lose yourself as lovers lose themselves,and you'll be that.

— "Looking For Your Own Face", translated by Coleman Barks, The Hand of Poetry (1993)

Attar of Nishapur

saidundated