Saadi Shirazi
Based on Wikipedia: Saadi Shirazi
The Poet Who Wandered for Thirty Years
Imagine leaving home as a teenager, spending three decades traveling across the entire Islamic world—from Baghdad to possibly India, through Syria where you might be captured by Crusaders—and then returning to your hometown so famous that your poetry precedes you like thunder before a storm. This was the life of Saadi Shirazi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet whose words have echoed across eight centuries and multiple civilizations.
His masterwork, the Bustan (The Orchard), made The Guardian's list of the 100 greatest books of all time. Persian scholars call him simply "The Master" or "The Wordsmith"—titles that sound grandiose until you read his work and realize they might actually undersell him.
Saadi lived during one of history's great hinges. Born around 1210 in Shiraz, a city in the Fars province of what is now Iran, he watched the Islamic Golden Age give way to Mongol conquest. He witnessed the sack of Baghdad in 1258, when Hulagu Khan's armies destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate and killed the last caliph. He wrote elegies for fallen rulers and advice manuals for the new ones. He survived—and thrived—through adaptation.
A Life Wrapped in Mystery
Here's the strange thing about one of history's most celebrated poets: we barely know anything concrete about his life. His own writings are stuffed with autobiographical stories—he claims to have killed a temple priest in India, to have been captured by Crusaders in Syria—but scholars are pretty confident most of these are literary inventions.
We can't even agree on his real name.
The oldest surviving source that mentions his full name dates to 1262, when a scholar named Ibn al-Fuwati wrote him a letter asking for samples of his Arabic poetry. According to that letter, his name was "Muslih al-Din Abu Muhammad Abd-Allah ibn Musharrif." But a manuscript from 1328 says it was "Musharrif al-Din ibn Muslih al-Din Abd-Allah." A compilation of his works from 1326 says something different again. Scholars have been arguing about this for centuries, with different camps championing different versions.
His pen name "Saadi," at least, is unambiguous—it appears as his signature in all his ghazals, a form of love poetry. The name probably honors the Salghurid dynasty that ruled Fars during most of his life, specifically the rulers named "Sa'd."
Education and the Long Wandering
Saadi's father died during his adolescence, leaving him an orphan. But before dying, his father apparently instilled in him what would become lifelong values of tolerance—an inheritance more valuable than money in a century of conquests and religious conflict.
Around 1223 or 1224, the teenage Saadi left Shiraz for Baghdad to continue his education. This timing wasn't coincidental: the local ruler Sa'd I had just been briefly deposed, making it a good moment to be elsewhere. In Baghdad, he may have studied with the Sufi master Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi—scholars have noticed striking parallels between Saadi's later teachings and Suhrawardi's philosophy.
Then came the wandering. For nearly thirty years, Saadi traveled across the Islamic world. Where exactly? This is where the mystery thickens. His writings suggest visits to India, Khorasan (in northeastern Iran), and Kashgar (in what is now western China). But the scholar Homa Katouzian examined the evidence and concluded that while Saadi probably did visit Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and the Arabian Peninsula, the more exotic destinations were likely fictional embellishments.
The Iranologist Paul Losensky puts it bluntly: "The effort to re-create an exact itinerary of his travels from his works is misguided."
What we can say is that Saadi returned to Shiraz in 1257 already famous. His ghazals had circulated widely enough that when he came home, he came home as a celebrity.
The Two Masterworks
Within a year of returning, Saadi completed his two greatest works in rapid succession. The Bustan (The Orchard) appeared in 1257, followed by the Gulistan (The Rose Garden) in 1258.
The Bustan is entirely in verse, written in the epic meter used for Persian heroic poetry. But instead of battles and kings, it's filled with stories illustrating the virtues prized in Islamic thought: justice, generosity, modesty, contentment. It describes the ecstatic practices of Sufi dervishes, those wandering mystics who sought divine union through music, dance, and poverty.
The Gulistan is different. It's mostly prose, sprinkled with poems like raisins in bread. It contains stories and personal anecdotes—many probably fictional—that demonstrate Saadi's profound awareness of human absurdity. Kings are fickle, power is fleeting, and the free poverty of the dervish may be preferable to the golden cage of court life.
One of Saadi's observations about work reveals his practical philosophy. He understood that what people do for a living shapes who they become. This wasn't abstract moralizing—it was hard-won wisdom from watching societies across the Islamic world.
Surviving the Mongol Storm
Saadi returned to Shiraz at the worst possible moment. The Mongol Empire, which had been expanding for decades under Genghis Khan and his successors, was about to swallow everything he knew.
In 1256, the same year Saadi completed the Bustan, Abu Bakr ibn Sa'd—the Salghurid ruler Saadi praised in his poetry—acknowledged Mongol suzerainty. By 1258, Baghdad itself fell. The House of Wisdom, the greatest library in the world, was destroyed. The Tigris River reportedly ran black with ink from all the books thrown into it, then red with blood. The last Abbasid caliph was rolled in a carpet and trampled to death by horses.
Saadi wrote elegies for this catastrophe—one in Arabic, one in Persian—mourning the end of the caliphate and the death of the caliph. He was no supporter of Mongol rule.
And yet he survived. More than survived—he flourished.
Abu Bakr ibn Sa'd died in 1260, and his son Sa'd II died twelve days later. Saadi wrote elegies for both. Then came a rapid succession of rulers: Sa'd II's twelve-year-old son Muhammad I (ruling under his mother Tarkhan Khatun's supervision), then two of Abu Bakr's nephews, the second of whom—Saljuk Shah—lasted only five months before an alcohol-fueled uprising got him killed by the Mongols.
Finally, power passed to Abish Khatun, Sa'd II's youngest daughter. But this was a formality. Her forced marriage to Möngke Temür, son of Hulagu Khan himself, meant Shiraz was now effectively under direct Mongol control.
Saadi adapted. He wrote poems for the Mongol administrators, particularly Amir Ankyanu, the governor of Shiraz from 1268 to 1272. But these weren't the fawning panegyrics typical of court poetry. As Losensky notes, "None of these works can be considered panegyrics in the usual sense of the word, since they consist mostly of counsel and warnings concerning the proper conduct of rulers."
Even under foreign occupation, Saadi was still teaching.
The Voice of Experience
In the Bustan, Saadi includes a remarkable passage about the Mongol wars, told through a friend who fought against them:
"In Isfahan I had a friend who was warlike, spirited, and shrewd... after long I met him: 'O tiger-seizer!' I exclaimed, 'what has made thee decrepit like an old fox?' He laughed and said: 'Since the days of war against the Mongols, I have expelled the thoughts of fighting from my head.'"
The friend describes the battle in vivid terms: the earth covered with spears like a forest of reeds, the storm of arrows falling like hail, cuirasses soaked with blood. But his conclusion isn't about tactics or courage:
"When Fortune does not favour, of what avail is fury? ... When the key of victory is not in the hand, no one can break open the door of conquest with his arms."
This fatalism might seem passive, even defeatist. But in context, it's survival wisdom. The Mongols were unstoppable. Those who fought died. Those who adapted—like Saadi himself—lived to write poetry about it later.
The Ghazals: Love as Art Form
Beyond his prose masterworks, Saadi composed around 700 ghazals—short lyric poems that are the Persian equivalent of sonnets. Many experts believe the ghazal form reached its absolute peak in the work of Saadi and his successor Hafez.
A ghazal is structured around a single rhyme that repeats at the end of each couplet. They're musical by design, and Saadi paid special attention to circular meters—rhythmic patterns that loop in ways that feel natural for singing or recitation aloud.
The central theme of most ghazals is love. But where many poets wander from topic to topic within a single poem, Saadi's romantic ghazals stay focused on love from beginning to end. Scholars describe them as simple, pure, and earthy—which in literary criticism is high praise, not dismissal.
His ghazals were organized into four collections: Tayyibat, Bada'i, Khawatim, and Ghazaliyat-e Qadim (the Early Ghazals). The Early Ghazals, from his youth, burn with passion. The Khawatim, from his old age, turn toward asceticism and mysticism. The middle collections—Tayyibat and Bada'i—blend both modes, and artistically they're considered his finest work.
Writing in Two Languages
Saadi also wrote in Arabic, the scholarly and religious language of the Islamic world (much as Latin functioned in medieval Europe). He composed qasidas—formal odes—along with shorter pieces and individual verses.
The Orientalist Edward Browne was blunt in his assessment: Saadi's Arabic poetry is "average quality." This might sound like an insult, but consider the context. Saadi was writing in his second language, competing against native Arabic speakers in a tradition going back centuries. Being merely average in Arabic while being transcendent in Persian is still quite an achievement.
A collection of his Arabic works was finally compiled and published in 2011 by the Saadi Studies Center, with Persian translations—a recognition that even his "lesser" work deserves preservation.
The Tomb and Its Survival
Saadi died in Shiraz, probably between late 1291 and late 1292. Even this date is uncertain: early sources give dates ranging from 1291 to 1299. The scholar Zabihollah Safa, working from the earliest reliable chronicle (written in 1330), concluded he died between November 25 and December 22, 1291. The confusion may come from when chroniclers chose to mark the date—at the moment of death, or at the end of the forty-day mourning period, which would have fallen in the new year.
His tomb in Shiraz became a place of pilgrimage, but by the eighteenth century, it had fallen into disrepair. The German cartographer Carsten Niebuhr visited in 1765 and wrote: "This building is very dilapidated, and will likely collapse unless some rich Mohammedan takes pity on it and has it repaired."
A few years later, the Zand ruler Karim Khan—who made Shiraz his capital—ordered renovations. He had an iron railing installed around the gravestone and a brick and plaster structure built over the grave. The tomb has been restored several times since, and today it remains one of Shiraz's most visited sites.
The Master's Reach
Saadi's influence extended far beyond Persian literature. In the Western tradition, he has been quoted by philosophers and politicians who may never have read his complete works. His aphorisms travel well: they contain universal observations about human nature that don't require understanding thirteenth-century Persian politics to appreciate.
The title "Master of Speech" was not given lightly. In a literary culture that produced Rumi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam, and Ferdowsi, to be singled out as simply "The Master" says everything about how his contemporaries and successors viewed him.
What made Saadi exceptional wasn't just technical skill, though he had that in abundance. It was his range—from romantic passion to mystical contemplation, from court flattery to sharp political critique, from prose storytelling to intricate verse. He wrote the love poems of a young man, the travel stories of an adventurer, and the moral reflections of an elder who had seen empires fall. He lived through the end of one world and the beginning of another, and he made literature from both.
Eight centuries later, we're still reading him. In a world of ephemeral content and forgotten bestsellers, that's the only review that matters.
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