Reading room

Tadhkirat al-awliya (Memorial of God's Friends)

Attar

Attar's only prose work and the great Persian collection of saints' lives: some seventy biographies of masters of classical Sufism, from Ja'far al-Sadiq, Uways al-Qarani and Hasan of Basra to al-Hallaj, with their sayings and anecdotes, among them those of Rabi'a al-Adawiyya. Attar relies almost solely on written sources he rarely names and reworks the stories with a taste of his own, but he translates the Arabic sayings faithfully. The account of al-Hallaj's execution is its most famous page. Widely read since the thirteenth century, it also matters as a specimen of early Persian prose.