Farid al-Din Attar

Farid al-Din Attar was a Persian Sufi poet born at Nishapur in Khorasan, who worked as a pharmacist or perfumer (the name Attar means 'druggist'). He is the author of the Mantiq al-Tair (The Conference of the Birds), the Ilahi-nama and a prose biographical collection of Sufi saints, and tradition places his death at about 1221, at the Mongol sack of Nishapur.

He is represented here by Edward FitzGerald's free abridgement of the Mantiq al-Tair, published after FitzGerald's death in 1889 as Bird Parliament, in which the birds of the world seek their king and find him in themselves. It is given as a single long work.