Nishapur

Farid al-Din Attar kept a pharmacy in Nishapur, which is where his name comes from, and wrote some of the most widely read poetry in Persian. His Conference of the Birds sets the birds of the world debating whether to seek out the Simurgh, the king they have never seen. Each offers an excuse for staying home, the hoopoe answers each in turn with a story, and those who set out cross seven valleys, of seeking, love, knowledge, detachment, unity, bewilderment and finally poverty and annihilation. Thirty birds arrive. What they find is that the Persian for thirty birds is si murgh, and the thing they were looking for is what they have become.

The pun carries the doctrine, and it is a better summary of the annihilation of the self in God than any prose exposition of the period.

Attar's other great work is not poetry. His memorial of the saints is a collection of lives and sayings of the earlier Sufis, and for a number of them, including Rabia of Basra and the executed mystic Hallaj, it is the principal source anyone has. That makes him both an author and, for the historian, a problem, since his purpose was edification rather than record and the material had been circulating orally for centuries. Rumi, who was a child when Attar was old, is said to have met him, and treated him afterwards as a master.

Nishapur was one of the four great cities of Khurasan and, for two centuries, one of the most productive scholarly centres in the Muslim world. Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, whose collection of hadith stands beside al-Bukhari's as one of the two most authoritative in Sunni Islam, was of this city and is buried in its outskirts. Its madrasas included a foundation of the Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Mulk, and al-Ghazali, who came from a nearby town, taught there before and after the crisis of confidence that made him abandon his chair for a decade of wandering and produce the reconciliation of law with inner practice that shaped Sunni piety afterwards.

The city also produced a distinctive spiritual movement. The people of blame held that any outward sign of devotion risks becoming vanity, and that a seeker should therefore conceal his practice and even court the contempt of others in order to keep the account with God private. It was a corrective aimed at the professionalisation of piety, and the idea reappears in later Sufi literature and in the wandering dervish traditions.

The Mongol army destroyed Nishapur in 1221 with a thoroughness the sources dwell on, and the city never regained its standing. Much of what its libraries held is known only because later writers quoted it. Omar Khayyam, mathematician, astronomer and calendar reformer, was born and buried there, and a garden pavilion now marks the grave.