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"The best among people," Avicenna says, "is the one whose soul is perfected by becoming an intellect." Such perfection, however, is an opportunity not suited for everyone. According to Avicenna and other medieval Muslim philosophers, the unintelligent have little ability to grasp universals and thus, instead of being encouraged to do so, must be controlled by revealed law. In stark opposition, the poet Farid al-Din 'Attar, influenced by other Sufi-influenced writers in eastern Iran, challenges such intellectual elitism. 'Attar advocates a search for the Real by means of a disposition, a highly attuned outlook. He describes that outlook―grateful, receptive, intellectually simple, reliant on God and in constant conversation with Him―as the "religion of old women." This phrase originates in a famous saying of the Prophet Muhammad, one that 'Attar sees as applying most perfectly to the female saint Rabi'a. In doing so, 'Attar presents an ethos attainable by all, but nearer at hand to those who know God with an innocent, guileless, and even unlettered sincerity.
Bio
Cyrus Ali Zargar is the Endowed al-Ghazali Distinguished Professor in Islamic Studies in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley's Department of Near Eastern Studies (2008) and holds a BA in English Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles (2000). Prior to UCF, Zargar taught in the Department of Religion at Augustana College. His research focuses on classical Sufism, Islamic philosophy, Arabic and Persian Sufi literature, and ethics in literature and film. Zargar is the author of two books, Sufi Aesthetics: Beauty, Love, and the Human Form in the Writings of Ibn 'Arabi and 'Iraqi (2011) and The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism (2017), with a third monograph, Religion of Love: Farid al-Din 'Attar (d. 1221) and the Sufi Tradition, forthcoming.
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