From motherhood to Sufi mother (the position of the mother and the manifestations of the characters of mothers in Tadhkirat-ul-Awliyā)

Tadhkirat-ul-Awliyā is one of the valuable mystical prose works in which Farīd ud-Dīn Mohammad Attar Nishapouri describes some great saints and mystics. A bulk of this book addresses the life and characters of the saints with a narrative structure in order to better represent different dimensions of their characters to the readers. A close reading of Tadhkirat-ul-Awliyā's narratives indicates that women are frequently and consistently represented as mother, wife, daughter and beloved. Furthermore, the influence of these positions on saints and mystics is revealed. Using purposive sampling and content analysis, in this article we investigate the representation of mother in Attar's Tadhkirat-ul-Awliyā. In this light, we examine how the mothers play their roles, how they are positioned in mystics' views, also adding that we introduce a new mother character called Sufi mother