Cheap Perfume?

Abstract

This article examines the shifting fortunes of the Pand-nāma, once the most widely read work attributed to the twelfth-century Persian poet Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, in order to challenge prevailing notions of literary center and margin in the study of Islamic literature. While today ʿAṭṭār is mainly celebrated as the author of The Conference of the Birds, a mystical allegory of a spiritual quest, the early modern Islamicate world had a different ʿAṭṭār in mind. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was not the soaring tale of birds in search of their king that defined ʿAṭṭār’s literary presence, but rather the Pand-nāma, a didactic text of moral instruction. Modern scholars have largely dismissed the Pand-nāma due to its disputed authorship, viewing it as the work of a so-called Pseudo-ʿAṭṭār and thus unworthy of sustained attention. This article shifts the focus away from questions of authenticity to ask: who (or what) was “ʿAṭṭār” to a reader in the medieval and early modern world? What does the difference between their ʿAṭṭār and ours reveal about evolving understandings of authorship, authority, and tradition? And finally, how might the rise and fall of the Pand-nāma help us make sense of the wandering centers and margins in the Islamic world?