another long poem while serving the needs of 600 patients daily.^50 The
inordinately large volume of patients hints toward a metaphorical implica-
tion for his sobriquet, suitable for a poet who offers a unique cure for
religion from thepharmakonof rhetoric.
Attar and his readers would have been well aware of the Platonic trope of
writing as medicine. The trope appears in the less common of the two
prefaces of the eighth-century Arabic translation ofKalila and Dimna.In
contrast to the other preface, where Anoushirwan sends the doctor
Borzuya to acquire a book of wisdom from India, in this version he
sends Borzuya to acquire a plant that revives the dead, but he returns
with books. While the reasons behind this alternative remain unclear, the
philosophical underpinnings of the need for medicine being fulfilled by a
book of wisdom may parallel the Hellenization of medical terms in the
Arabic translation of the narrative of Borzuya’s voyage.^51 This version was
disseminated widely through Firdausi’sShahnameh. Under the king’s
patronage, Borzuya sets offto India tofind a silk-like plant capable of
making the dead speak. Frustrated by his search, he encounters an elderly
sage, who says:
the plant that you have tried
So hard tofind is speech, the mountainside
Is knowledge, and the corpse is any man
Who’s ignorant, since only knowledge can
Give us life.^52
Whether or not people encountered Plato’sPhaedrus, through Firdausi
they would have encountered an element of its wisdom. Such populariza-
tion of Sufimetaphysics through poetry had already been achieved by Sanai
of Ghazna (1080–1131/1141).
In keeping with these forebears, Attar addressed the public through
direct language and imagery rather than through theory, offering a rhetoric
suitable to popular reception. His sobriquet structurally resembles that of
Shahib al-Din of Suhraward,“meteor of the religion,”centralizing his
philosophy of illuminationism through allusion to the Black Stone at the
Kaaba, the nexus of all Islamic worship. In an era of religious controversy,
the translation of illusionism into poetry may have provided a subterfuge
through which Islamized Platonism couldflourish, while his sobriquet may
have offered an ideological code difficult to censor. Rather than
(^50) Boyle, 1979 :9. (^51) de Blois, 1990 : 40, 27. (^52) Ferdowsi, 2007 : 706.
The Simurgh 93