According to reader-response theorist Louise Rosenblatt, the ‘poem’ – by which she means any literary work, not necessarily just a poetic one – must not be confused with a ‘text’. A text is a concrete set of signs in the world, whereas the poem is an ‘event’, a temporal unfolding produced through a particular reader's ‘transaction’ with a text. A poem's significance – in a certain respect, its very existence – cannot be divorced from the act of reading. The poem-as-event, however, is necessarily more ephemeral than the text that it involves. Certainly, acts of reception can sometimes leave their marks on texts, especially in the materiality of the manuscript tradition. Among premodern Persian sources, instances of reading and performance are also depicted in cer-tain genres, including hagiographies, biographical anthologies and other forms of anecdotal literature (whether accurately or not is another question). In most cases, however, a particular text cannot document or directly speak to its own reception, which it necessarily precedes. Still, texts can thematise reading and interpretation in a more general sense and recursively imagine their ideal reception, if not depict the actuality thereof; in this way, they might suggest certain modalities of engagement and perhaps even guide how actual readers approach them. Such themes infuse the work of ʿAttar, who displays a thoroughgoing fascination with speech and its effects, including those of his own textualised discourse. His oeuvre is full of meta-poetic commentary and depic-tions of pedagogical relationships, didactic utterances and paraenetic speech situations. In this sense, his work is not only didactic, but meta-didactic: his poems call their readers to piety as they simultaneously meditate, in a reflexive fashion, on their own rhetorical function. Even though the experience of historical readers who encountered ʿAttar's poems largely eludes our grasp, we can still investigate how such encounters are recursively imagined within his texts, and how the structure of his poems imply particular reception stances to which his readers are thereby summoned.

Over the course of the previous seven chapters, The Poetics of Spiritual Instruction has examined how ʿAttar both performs didacticism and reflexively considers, sometimes more explicitly and sometimes less so, the purpose and conditions of his instructive work.