Guzide-e asrâr-nâmâ.

Original bdg. HC. Roy. 8vo. (24 x 17 cm). In Persian. [14], 184 p. Guzide-e asrâr-nâmâ. Attar was a twelfth-century Persian poet, theoretician of Sufism, and hagiographer from Nishapur who had an immense and lasting influence on Persian poetry and Sufism. Man?iq-u?-?ayr [The Conference of the Birds] and Ilahi-Nama [The Book of Divine] are among his most famous works. "Asrar-nama" is the earliest of Attar's mystical narrative poems ; it has attracted less scholarly attention than the other three. This may be partly due to its lack of a frame-story. The contents are arranged in 22 discourses (maqalas) in random order, without regard to sequence of ideas. Each maqala begins with an outline of an idea, which is then developed by means of short anecdotes. Frequently the anecdotes are accompanied by reflections which lead into thematically related fields or, in some cases, stray quite far from the basic idea. The work thus lacks a definite conceptual structure. Its concluding message is the hope of release of man's spiritual substance from the world's grasp. In no other work does ?A?ar propound the gnostic concept of the soul's fall and the duty to free it from worldly and material bonds so comprehensively and forcefully as in the Asrar-nama. The resultant belief that this work influenced the preamble of the Ma?nawi-e ma'nawi, probably gave rise to the legend that the aged ?A?ar donated it to the young Jalal-al-din Rumi as his testament. The concluding message naturally leads the author into moralizing reflections of the world's transience, vanity, and depravity, which fill whole chapters in the last third of the work (chap. 14 onward). After the three introductory chapters on taw?id, na't, and manaqeb, the fundamentals of the gnostic concept are expounded; certain aspects are elaborated in chapters 8 and 11, and in chapter 5 the favorite theme of reason and love (aql o esq) is introduced. Chapter 12 also seems worthy of special mention, because it is about the impenetrability of celestial and extramundane secrets (asrar) and is thus more pertinent to the book's title than the rest. (Source: Encyclopedia Iranica).

Lingue: Persian