Professors Nicholas Boylston and Cyrus Zargar explore the striking poetry of ‘Attar of Nishapur, an seminal Persian Sufi poet and master of the Persian Masnavi (epic in rhymed-couplets) genre. His Conference of the Birds is a masterpiece of Sufi literature, and it and ‘Attar’s other poetic works, including his ghazals, exerted a strong influence on later Sufi poets, especially Rumi.

Links and Further Reading/Listening:

“Attar’s “Conference of the Birds” – The Greatest Sufi Masterpiece?” Let’s Talk Religion

Dick Davis and Afkham Darbandi , The Conference of the Birds (London: Penguin Classics, 1984)

Zargar, Cyrus, Religion of Love: Sufism and Self-Transformation in the Poetic Imagination of ʿAṭṭār (Albany: SUNY Press, 2024).

Lewisohn, Leonard and Christopher Shackle, Attar and the Persian Sufi Tradition: The Art of Spiritual Flight (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019).

Austin O’Malley, The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction: Farid al-Din ʿAttar and Persian Sufi Didacticism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023,

Boylston, Nicholas, “Writing the Kaleidoscope of Reality: The Significance of Diversity in the 6 th/12 th Century Persian Metaphysical Literature of Sanā’ī,’Ayn Al-Qudāt and’Attār.” PhD diss..
Georgetown University, 2017.

Kenneth Avery and Ali Alizadeh, Fifty Poems of Attar, (Melbourne: re.press, 2007)

Host: Oludamini Ogunnaike

Guests: Nicholas Boylston and Cyrus Zargar

Edited By: Alana Bittner, WJTU

Online Collection of ‘Attar’s Poetry (in Persian): https://ganjoor.net/attar