The introduction to the Mokhtar-nama, like many works of Persian poetry, contains a litany of conventional poetic boasts. ʿAttar praises his verses’ beauty, the unprecedented nature of the collection and the depth of their spiritual secrets. Near the end of the introduction, he invokes a metaphorical trope that might strike some modern readers as odd, but which was critical to premodern understandings of the transformative power of elegant speech – poetry in particular, but also prose. After expressing confidence that a mystically minded audience will be able to decode the hidden spiritual meaning of his quatrains, ʿAttar nonchalantly likens his verse to a kind of drug, almost as an aside. ‘Truly,’ he writes, ‘ʿAttar's poetic speech (sokhan) is an antidote (taryak).’ More precisely, taryak (theriac) was a compound medicine – usually containing opium – that was used as an antidote to toxins and venoms, but also more broadly as a general panacea for all sorts of aches and pains. The offhand nature of his remark testifies to the ubiquity and familiarity of the association for his readers, who would have found the comparison to be a natural one needing no further explanation. A number of intellectual discourses within the Islamicate world, especially philosophy and homiletics, routinely invoked the practice of medicine as analogues to their own therapeutic aims, and poetry was frequently likened to a drug, especially in meta-poetic verses and prefaces. ʿAttar, however, pushes this conceptual metaphor further than his predecessors, adducing it throughout his oeuvre and making it a central pillar of his public poetic identity through his pen name, ʿAttar, which means not only ‘the perfumer’, but also ‘the pharmacist’.

This medicinal metaphor is more than mere boiler plate or the parroting of convention. It is a wide-ranging heuristic for thinking through the rhetorical power of speech, explicitly invoked by ʿAttar in regards to his own verse (especially the masnavis and the Mokhtar-nama) and the saintly dicta in the Tazkera. The first half of this chapter examines what this characterisation implies about the function of ʿAttar's texts, the effects they are imagined to have on their readers and listeners and their intended manner of consumption. When speech is cast as medicinal, its pragmatic value is highlighted; such a characterisation speaks not only to poetry's form or meaning, but also to its ability to impact and transform its audiences.