Reading room

Mukhtar-nama (The Book of Selections)

Attar

An anthology of quatrains (*rubaiyat*) arranged by theme in fifty chapters, which Attar selected from his output because his friends got lost in the mass of verse in the *Divan*. After divine unity, the Prophet and the companions, the chapters deal with annihilation and bewilderment, practical and Sufi ethics and, in two-fifths of the book, love and its symbolism: the beloved's eyes, brows, mole and lips, the rose, dawn, the moth and the candle. It is one of the largest collections of mystical quatrains in Persian.