Mušarrif al-Dīn Saʿdī

Saʿdī is the other great son of Shiraz — a century earlier than Ḥāfiẓ, and his spiritual master across the distance. If Ḥāfiẓ sings in fragments of lightning, Saʿdī tells stories. If Ḥāfiẓ ravishes the soul through ambiguity, Saʿdī instructs it through clear wisdom. Together the two poets form the two slopes of the Persian soul.

Thirty years of wandering

Born in Shiraz around 1210, Saʿdī lost his father very young and grew up in poverty. He studied at the Niẓāmiyya of Baghdad — the great university of the time, where Ghazālī once taught. Then, fleeing the Mongol invasion that ravaged the Iranian world, he began what would be thirty years of travels across the Muslim world.

He travelled through Syria, Arabia, Egypt, Asia Minor, Iraq, Mesopotamia. He performed the pilgrimage to Mecca fourteen times, it is said. He met wandering dervishes and established shaykhs, merchants and beggars, princes and slaves. He was once captured by the Crusaders in Syria and put to forced labour, from which a rich Muslim ended by ransoming him — only to give him then his daughter in marriage (a marriage he would bitterly regret, as he would recount later).

All this experience nourishes his work. Saʿdī does not practise spirituality in the cell of the hermit — he practises it on the roads of the world. His wisdom is that of a man who has seen everything, who knows how manifold are human beings, and who has drawn from it a philosophy of life at once lucid and compassionate.

The return to Shiraz

Around 1257, at nearly fifty years of age, Saʿdī returned to Shiraz, his native city, which had meanwhile changed political hands but had escaped the worst of the Mongol disaster. He was received there as an illustrious man. The local prince — Saʿd ibn Zangī, who gave his name to the poet (Saʿdī = “of Saʿd”) — protected him. Saʿdī settled, wrote. He would live another thirty-five years, until around 1292.

During these tranquil decades, he composed the two works that would make his glory.

The two gardens

The Gulistan would be, for centuries, the learning book of the Persian language — like Cicero's De Officiis for medieval Latin. Every educated child in the Persian sphere, from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, learned it by heart. Even today, many Iranians cite Saʿdī in conversation as one cites La Fontaine in France.

The method of the tale

The strength of Saʿdī is brevity. Where ʿAṭṭār unfolds long narratives, Saʿdī sums up a spiritual truth in a few lines — an anecdote, followed by a couplet that draws the lesson. This concision allows him to treat an infinite variety of subjects without ever wearying.

A typical example drawn from the Gulistan:

A dervish said to a king: “You have neither the nobility of your father, nor the wisdom of your grandfather.” The king grew angry. The dervish said: “Why are you vexed? Truth is bitter, but it nourishes. Flattery is sweet, but it poisons.”

Better a truth that wounds than a lie that caresses. Saʿdī, Gulistan

The famous verse of humanity

A couplet of the Bustān has become, in Persian culture, the very summary of human brotherhood. So famous that it was chosen to be inscribed at the entrance of the United Nations headquarters in New York, where it can be read in several languages:

In six lines, Saʿdī states human universalism. It is, seven centuries before the Universal Declaration, a perfect formulation of the spiritual brotherhood that transcends confessional and political borders. Sufi wisdom leads naturally to this intuition: if all humans share in the same divine breath, they are limbs of one same body.

A spirituality of conviviality

Saʿdī is not a mystic of ecstasy like Al-Ḥallāj, nor a metaphysician like Ibn ʿArabī. His spirituality is concrete, social, convivial. He teaches:

• The justice of the prince — a recurrent theme: a bad king ruins the spirituality of a whole people.
• Generosity toward the poor — without which Islam remains a dead letter.
• Contentment with little — not a harsh asceticism, but a joyful sobriety.
• Measured speech — to know how to speak when one must, to know how to keep silent the rest of the time.
• Spiritual friendship — to choose one's companions, because the soul is contagious.

This practical wisdom is nourished by Sufism — Saʿdī frequented the brotherhoods, in particular the Suhrawardiyya in Iraq — but it addresses itself to everyone, not only to advanced mystics. It is what makes his popularity: an Iranian grandfather reads Saʿdī to his grandson; a Turkish merchant meditates upon him in his shop; an Indian prince comments upon him at his court.

Wisdom translated

Saʿdī was one of the first Oriental poets translated in Europe. As early as 1634, André du Ryer published a French translation of the Gulistan. Adam Olearius translated it into German in 1654. Voltaire, Diderot, Hugo, Goethe, Emerson, Thoreau — all read and cited him. Goethe wrote in his journal: “No one, since the Ancients, has known better than Saʿdī how to say wisdom in perfect aphorisms.”

This transmission is precious. Saʿdī has, perhaps more than any other Sufi poet, carried the wisdom of Islam into the West. Before Europe discovered Rūmī or Ibn ʿArabī, it read Saʿdī. And much of what is today called “humanist morality” in our European languages secretly bears the trace of his anecdotes.

The mausoleum

Saʿdī died in Shiraz around 1292, at the advanced age of eighty-two. His tomb, the Saʿdiyeh, is today in a magnificent garden of the city, at some distance from that of Ḥāfiẓ. The two poets — neighbours in life, neighbours in death — are the two eternal guardians of Persian spirituality.

Every being who comes into the world will sooner or later break.
Happy is the one who has left behind him a good memory —
for the good memory is immortal. Saʿdī, Gulistan