Shaykh Sa’di of Shiraz: Persian poet and Sufi Master

“He was from amongst the greatest of the Sufis and was in the noble circle of intimates of Shaykh Abd ‘Abdullah Hafif (may his secret be sanctified!). He had a complete portion from the religious sciences [‘ulûm] and a perfect share in belles lettres [âdâb] and he travelled much and went to many climes and he performed the Hajj pilgrimage on foot many times and he entered the temple of Somnath and defeated their great idol and he studied with many great shaykhs and spent time in the company of Shaykh Shihabuddin Suharwardi and he made a journey with him in a boat on the ocean.

They say that he was a water-carrier in Jerusalem and in the balad al-Shâm for a long time and gave water to people until Khizr (peace be upon him) arrived and made him satiated with his pure gifts and his spiritual virtues.

Once when he argued with one of the greats from amongst the descendents of the Prophet [sâdât], that noble descendent saw the Blessed Messenger of Allah (Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him) in a dream and the Messenger was angry with him. So, when we awakened he went to the Shaykh and begged for forgiveness.

One of the shaykhs from amongst the deniers of Sa’di saw this event one night that the gates of heaven were opened and angels along with a host of light appeared. He asked, ‘What is this?’ and they said, ‘It is for Sa’di Shirazi for he has recited a couplet which has become accepted by the Lord Almighty (Glorious is He!) and that couplet is this:

Barg-e-darakhtân-e-sabz dar nazar-e- hoshiyâr
Har vaqtî daftarîst ma’rifat-e-kard-e-gâr’


(The green leaves of the trees in the sight of the discerning
At every moment are a sign of gnosis of the Creator!)

That dear man when he experienced this vision also went to the gate of the Sufi monastery of Shaykh Sa’di to tell him the good news. He saw that a lamp was burning and that Sa’di was chanting to himself; when he listened carefully (he realised that) Sa’di was reciting that very couplet.

He went from this world to the mercy of Allah Almighty on the night of Friday in the month of Shawwal in 691.” [1]

This is how Jâmî, himself generally regarded as the last eminent figure in the history of classical Persian literature [2] (d.1492), describes Sa’dî in the entry devoted to him in his famous compendium of biographies of Sufi saints, the Nafâhat al Uns. From this description a very vivid picture emerges as to how Shaykh Sa’dî Shirâzi was regarded by his fellow Muslims in the Indo-Persian world—and still is to this day by the common man (the cynicism of Orientalists and modern-day critics notwithstanding).

However, as has been noted above, many of these ‘facts’ about Sa’dî related by Jâmî (and others) are now disputed by Orientalists and also modern Iranian critics. For example, the entry on Sa’dî in the Encyclopaedia of Islam states:

“More perhaps than any other Persian writer who preceded him, or of his own period, Sa’dî refers to himself constantly and in highly specific terms throughout the course of his writings; from shortly after his death until the present century elaborate biographies of the poet have been inferred from these references…More recent scholarship on the period…has called many of these details in doubt. The virtual certainty that some are poetic inventions (for example…his unmasking of a fraudulent Brahmin at the Hindu temple in Somnath, his claim to have seen someone ‘in the west’ be borne across water on his prayer-mat…has caused the authenticity of the remainder to become questionable, with the result that few facts can be deduced with certainty about the poet’s life.” [3]


However the assertion by the writer of the above article about it being a “virtual certainty” that many of these stories told by Sa’dî in his writings, either about himself or about others, are “poetic inventions” deserves further comment before moving onto the main topic of this essay. Nuh Keller writing about BG Martin’s Muslim Brotherhoods in Nineteenth Century Africa makes some comments ‘on the literature that has been termed Orientalism, or in the contemporary idiom, “area studies”’ , [4] which are pertinent here too. He says,

“It is a viewpoint requiring that scholarly description of something like “African Islam” (Martin’s phrase) be first and foremost objective. The premises of this objectivity conform closely, upon reflection, to the lived and felt experience of a post-religious, Western intellectual tradition in understanding religion; namely, that comparing human cultural systems and societies in their historical succession and multiplicity leads the open-minded observer to moral relativism, since no moral value can be discovered which on its own merits is transculturally valid. Here, human civilisations, with their cultural forms, religions, hopes, aims, beliefs, prophets, sacred scriptures, and deities, are essentially plants that grow out of the earth, springing from their various seeds and soils, thriving for a time, and then withering away. The scholar’s concern is only to record these elements and propose a plausible relation between them.

“Such a point of departure, if de rigueur for serious academic work…is of course non-Islamic and anti-Islamic. As a fundamental incomprehension of Islam, it naturally distorts what it seeks to explain…And…we should keep in mind that their premises are those of unbelief, and how this colors the whole process of scholarly enquiry. We find in Muslim Brotherhoods, for example, a discussion of a hypothesized alteration in the “carbon dioxide-oxygen balance in the brain,” resulting from communal remembrance of Allah (dhikr) and producing a susceptibility to visions, hallucinations and intense emotional experiences that enabled African Sufi brotherhoods to “generate much love and devotion” between members, who could thereby be more successfully directed towards collective action. When one looks at the men being explained, however…those who risked their lives in jihad…for four, twelve, fifteen, twenty-one, or thirty-five years, an explanation of their motivations that downplays faith in Allah and His messenger (Allah bless him and give him peace) must surely need a great deal more to be convincing than this type of fatuous detail. Or the suggestion that a mujahid scholar who had memorised the Holy Koran and the Sahih collections of Bukhari and Muslim, and lived and taught the strictest adherence to Islam by precept and by example for a lifetime of seventy years…might have committed suicide after a defeat in battle—a report based on a single story told by a blacksmith of unknown veracity some twenty-six years after the event—such aspects show little appreciation of psychological absurdities in an Islamic context.” [5]


The reason for quoting this rather lengthy extract is that almost all of the Orientalist writers on Sa’dî have made it a point to question his veracity when revealing details about himself in his writings based on no other grounds than those discussed in the extract above and, when, contrasted with the saintly portrait of the man given by Jami (for example) it appears puzzling that a man who advocated ‘virtue and justice in a time of red terror’ [6] and who preached justice to princes [7] and possessed rare courage [8] and who had an ‘unwavering devotion to the high principles of Islam’ [9] and who ‘died in his monastery’ [10] would bring himself to lie and fabricate things when it is common knowledge even amongst lay-Muslims (let alone scholars and Sufis of Sa’dî’s calibre!) that lying is considered an enormity in Islam and one of the worst sins [11]. To give a last—and absurd example—the contention in the Encylopaedia of Islam that Sa’dî’s “sexual preference would seem to have been for young males” [12] based on nothing other than a bizarre reading of his works shows the extent to which our own modern sensibilities may colour our reading of such works! Before reading the following analysis-based largely on these Orientalist works on Sa’dî, these caveat should be borne in mind.


Abu ‘Abd Allah Musharrif al Din b. Muslih Sa’dî was born in the early 13th century in Shiraz and is one of the most renowned authors of Persia [13] although the exact dates of his birth and death have been disputed by scholars [14] and vary considerably. He has a large literary output including the Bustân, the Gulistân, panegyrics (qasâ’id), some elegies (marthiyât), numerous ghazals (lyric poems), some quatrains and a small collection of obscene works as well as some poems in Arabic as well as six (attributed) Persian prose treaties—the authenticity of some of which is doubtful—and another poem in mathnawi form which is also of doubtful authenticity although it is closely linked to the name of Sa’dî [15].

However Sa’dî’s fame rests largely on the Gulistân, the Bustân and his ghazals [16] and it is these that will be discussed here. The Bustân and the Gulistân are both collections of moralising anecdotes arranged according to subject matter in books: ten books for the Bustân and eight for the Gulistân. The Bustân is unlike any previous significant poetical work of Sufism in the Persian language consisting, as it does, of a series of moral tales told in versified form (as opposed to a continuous narrative) with a Sufi tinge without the Sufism being explicit [17]. In this respect it was groundbreaking in its style. The Gulistân, which is a mixture of prose and poetry containing moral tales and Sufi teachings intertwined in a delightful fashion immediately made this genre central to Persian literary history and elevated it to a new level of sophistication [18]. Not surprisingly, both works were often imitated. None of these imitations though were able to match the brilliance of Sa’dî’s masterpieces.

The Bustân, also known as the Sa’di-nâma, was completed in 1257 and presented to the atabeg ruler of Shiraz Abu Bakr ibn Sa’d. Professor Levy described it with these words,
“(this poem) contains within its ten sections of facile and often beautiful verse, dissertations on justice, good government, beneficence, earthly and mystic love, humility, submissiveness, contentment, and other excellences.’ [19] The Bustân, as Professor Arberry tells us, quickly attained and ‘has ever since enjoyed a popularity almost unexampled in Persian literature’ [20]

Muhammad ‘Alî Furûghî praises it extravagantly in these words; words which seem to echo the sentiments of his fellow countrymen and others who are familiar with Persian literature:

“Perhaps one can say that this book has no like or parallel, either in Persian or in any other language, as regards elegance, eloquence, fluency, delicacy, charm, wisdom and insight.” [21]

Coming onto the Gulistân, which was written only a year after the Bustân [22]. Another critic, Muhammad Taqî Bahâr, after discussing the styles in the other prose writings of Sa’dî comes to the Gulistân. He says,
“It is in the Gulistân that one must look to discover Sa’dî’s art, mastery and personality. Had this book, small in size but large in substance, not existed two thirds of the master’s personality and sublime rank would vanish…” [23]

After this verdict Bahâr goes on to qualify this statement by analysing the stylistic aspects of the Gulistân and it is worth quoting this in full from Arberry. Thus:

“Bahâr declares that in this work Sa’dî invented a wholly new style of prose, different alike from the rugged models of antiquity and the artificial extravagances of his own time…Bahâr enumerates fourteen features characterizing the style of the Gulistân; he calls attention to the careful balance observed in the construction of the eight chapters, the consideration always given to holding the reader’s interest, the nice alternation of prose and verse, the brevity and succinctness of the anecdotes, the avoidance of difficult and outlandish words, the strict regard for polite proprieties. But it is in the discussion of the element of rhythm within the patterned prose that constitutes the most striking section of this brilliant diagnosis. Referring to the presence of rhythm to a varying extent in all ancient prose…Bahâr claims that with Sa’dî this feature becomes deliberate and all-pervasive while remaining natural and unforced.” [24]

Thus he shows that the whole of the Gulistân is a most intricate weave of subtly varied rhythms and an astonishing exercise in perfectly controlled virtuosity [25].

The finally part of the troika on which Sa’dî’s fame chiefly rests are his love lyrics. i.e. his ghazals. Although the ghazal form had existed before him, it was with him that the ghazal achieved its classical perfection [26]. His ghazals were unified by tone and subject matter and by his poetic trademark which is a relatively (as compared to Hafiz for example) simple language and its extraordinarily mellifluous elegance. His ghazals are divided into four groups: tayyibât (noble, pleasant); badâyi (rarities); khawâtîm (final) and qadîm (ancient). The first group is by far the largest. [27]

In Persia the ghazals are considered Sa’dî’s greatest achievement surpassing even the fame of his Bustân and Gulistân [28]. I conclude this brief mention of Sa’dî’s ghazals by quoting from that eminent scholar, Anne-Marie Schimmel:

“It is in this field, that is, the writing of sonnet-like love poems, that the historian of literature sees Sa’di’s very special role in the development of Persian poetry…Nonetheless it is Sa’di’s success in expressing love, joy, and suffering in delightful, soft, undulating phrases that marks the emergence of the ghazal as a major form of Persian poetry. Many of his ghazals are distinguished by a unity of the underlying theme, which is no longer the case with later poets, such as Hafez, or with the poets of the Indian style after about 1580.

The classical ghazal…can best be compared to something like chamber music—it is a form of poetry in which the sound of the words, the elegance and transparency of the phrases lead the reader into an elegance and transparency of the phrases lead the reader into an enchanted world where the figures move in perfect harmony. Sa’di was, no doubt, the first to create ghazals in this limpid, elegant style and thus set the example for generations to come…[Sa’di] remains the master of love poetry and the greatest stylist that Persia has produced.” [29]

Sa’dî’s achievement has been very great, by any reckoning, as has been seen, [30] and his work has been a major formative influence on subsequent writing in Persian.

No article on Shaykh Sa’dî would be complete however without a mention of an Arabic quatrain of his in praise of the Prophet of Islam which has become so famous within the circle of the Sufi and Sunni Muslims that it is used to this day as part of a litany of invocations to the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace). For example, it has even found a place in the famous Invocation of the Crown (Durûd Tâj)—an invocation of blessings on the Prophet—that forms part of the series of litanies for disciples in the Naqshbandi Order [31]. This quatrain is found in the Introduction of his Gulistân and in Arabic may be transliterated thus:

Balaghal ‘ula bi kamalihi
Kashafadujja bi jamalihi
Hasanat jami’u hisalihi
Sallu ‘alayhi wa Aalihi

Edward Rehatsek [33] translates it:

He attained exaltation by his perfection.
He dispelled darkness by his beauty.
Beauteous are all his qualities,
Benediction be on him and on his family.