The didactic masnavis of ʿAttar, like those of Sanaʾi and Nezami (d. 1209) before him, are composed primarily of two distinct forms of discourse: narrative anecdotes and explanatory homilies. The anecdotes are drawn from a host of generic traditions, from stories of the Prophet to Perso-Hellenic romances. They are then embedded in blocks of non-narrative discourse characterised by direct address, a hortatory mood and moralising sententiae. Due to their formal and rhetorical similarity with the discourse of preachers, I refer to these non-narrative sections as ‘homiletic’, following J. T. P. de Bruijn. The homilies generalise and amplify the stories’ moral points and interpret their symbolic meanings, while the stories exemplify and embody the homiletic injunctions in concrete, narrative situations. It is this alternating rhythm of narrative and homily that most obviously characterises the genre of the didactic masnavi.

In three of ʿAttar's four didactic masnavis, the amount of homiletic material is nearly equal to the amount of narrative. In his Asrar-nama and several earlier instances of the genre, it is several times greater. Nevertheless, the narratives have garnered the lion's share of scholarly attention, often in isolation from the homilies that surround them. The most prominent scholarly work on ʿAttar, Hellmut Ritter's Ocean of the Soul, is devoted almost exclusively to the narratives, and as Ritter himself frankly admits, he interprets the stories ‘often in isolation, detached from their context’. He also acknowledges that the meanings he extracts from them do not always correspond to the interpretations that ʿAttar himself presents in the corresponding homiletic sections. Other contemporary scholars largely follow suit: Navid Kermani takes the stories themselves as the most fertile material for exploring ʿAttar's theodicy and condemnation of God's injustice, as does Claudia Yaghoobi in her investigation of ʿAttar's attitudes towards subalterns, and Dick Davis in his analysis of poetic structure. To be sure, these scholars avail themselves of the poems’ homiletic content when appropriate, but their focus is very much on the narratives with the accompanying homiletic sections serving a secondary role in their analyses.