ʿAṭṭār’s Taḏkirat al-awliyāʾ and Jāmī’s Nafaḥāt al-uns

Abstract

This article presents two famous collections of the lives of saints: ʿAṭṭār’sTaḏkirat al-awliyāʾand Jāmī’sNafaḥāt al-uns. Every collection of the lives of saints shares the common tradition of Arabic-language works. Indeed, Hujvīrī’sKašf al-maḥjūband Anṣārī’sṬabaqāt al-ṣūfiyyahensured the transition with Sufi literature written in Arabic. However, theTaḏkirat al-awliyāʾis the first truly original work in Persian. ʿAṭṭār and Jāmī sought to make known to their respective communities of belief the words and deeds of spiritual masters, but they did so in two different ways. ʿAṭṭār chose a limited corpus of saints that, in his eyes, represented the primary movements of the first centuries of Sufism. Jāmī instead favoured exhaustiveness, amassing a great number of biographies, especially on the shaykhs of the Naqshbandi order. While Jāmī conveyed the paths of saintliness in accordance with the religious orthodoxy of his order, ʿAṭṭār showed a special attachment to the ecstatic masters. TheTaḏkirat al-awliyāʾandNafaḥāt al-unsthus represent two different ways of commemorating the memory of the spiritual masters who embodied the mystical thought of Islam.