In Chapter 9, Poem 11 of the Mokhtar Nameh, Farid al-Din Attar addresses the human struggle with existential uncertainty. The poem posits that living purely on the yearning for absolute certainty is impossible, which warrants grief for the human condition. Attar details this limitation by pointing to two states of ignorance: humans do not know their own identity in the present life, and they remain entirely unaware of the nature of the destination to which they are bound after death.