An undercurrent of transgression ran (and continues to run) throughout the sufi tradition, even after it became a dominant, ‘mainstream’ form of piety over vast swaths of Islamic lands from the twelfth century onwards. Only a small minority of sufis directly engaged in antinomian behaviour, and most saw their piety as the culmination of ‘orthodox’ Islam. Still, even most ‘sober’ sufis who would never dream of violating the dictates of the religious law showed an affinity for discourse that inverts, destabilises or reinterprets religious valuations in counter-intuitive and seemingly radical ways to uncover higher forms of religiousity. This penchant for disruption is clearly visible in ʿAttar, who routinely subverts the religious expectations of what he casts as a rote, insincere Islam within the discursive world of his texts. For example, following Ahmad Ghazali and Hallaj, ʿAttar recasts the rebellious Satan – who refused to bow down before Adam as God commanded him – as an uncompromising monotheist and sincere lover of God. ʿAttar was also a major practitioner of the qalandariat genre, in which the religious valences attached conventional signs of piety and impiety are inverted: the sufi cloak thus becomes a symbol of hypocrisy, while wine-drinking, gambling and the Christian cincture are celebrated as markers of a sincere religiosity beyond exoteric Islam. The qalandariyat's ethos of transgression is famously captured in one of ʿAttar's longest tales, that of Shaykh Sanʿan, in which the eponymous shaykh, an accomplished religious scholar, travels from Mecca to Byzantium after a disturbing dream. There he falls in love with a Christian girl, converts to Christianity and commits a variety of outrages against Islamic norms in the hopes of winning her affection. By the end of the story, Sanʿan converts back to Islam, but now that his faith has been refined in the crucible of love, it is purified from the dross of insincerity and self-attachment that had previously contaminated it.

ʿAttar's shorter anecdotes also participate in this transgressive ethos, and their conceptual inversions are frequently expressed through a specific narrative structure. As the anecdotes unfold, they seem to invite certain interpretive judgements only to suddenly subvert them and reframe the prior action's religious significance in dramatic ways.