Attar of Nishapur
Persian Sufi poet (c. 1145 - c. 1221) · Writers · Died at 76
Attar of Nishapur is read about 485 times a day, in 55 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 27 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 400 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?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.
Also in Deutsch
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In their own words 10
, I shall grasp the soul's skirt with my hand / and stamp on the world's head with my foot.
The sea / Will be a sea / Whatever the drop's philosophy.
Your face is neither infinite nor ephemeral. / You can never see your own face, / only a reflection, not the face itself.
About this person
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.
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