Animals and non-humans have always been the subjects of fables and allegories in Persian prose and poetry. Farid ud-Din Attar Nishapuri is amongst the earliest and the most successful Persian poets who used his poetry as a platform to define the Islamic mysticism and its fundamental doctrines using birds and animals. In his lyrical work, Mantiq-ul-tayr(the Conference of the Birds), he has magnificently illustrated sufi’s fundamental principles as well as the teachings of the sufi shaikhs (spiritual leader) by using specific birds as representatives of the searching soul who set out to learn the true path. In his work, Attar portrays a crowd of birds who decide to go on a mission in pursuit of their promised sovereign, or the divine. Attar has used these birds to define Sufis’ frame of mind, their personal experiences, the spiritual stages they go through in order to reach unity, and their worldviews. Within this context, the character of hoopoe represents a shaikh or pir (wise leader). The other birds are illustrated by their species while each of them demonstrate a particular human figure. This paper seeks to explore the ways that Attar deploys animals for literary, ethical, and philosophical purposes. A number of animal characters of Attar’s Mantiq-ul-tayr will be analyzed to demonstrate the significance of animals within Sufi literature. By engaging in discourse analysis and comparing the poet’s portrayal of birds with other literary works’ presentation of animals, this paper will show that these allegorical entities and characters don’t appear with the same symbolic significance from one story to another across the board of literary works. Moreover, the paper will produce a platform to associate Attar’s symbolic work with similar Persian and South Asian allegorical accounts, such as Panchatantra, to facilitate a better understanding of the animal genre in Persian poetry.