Saadi Shirazi

Saadi is the poet’s pen name, and it signs every one of his ghazals. His full name is recorded in many different forms; the Encyclopaedia Iranica adopts Abu Muhammad Musharrif al-Din Muslih ibn Abdallah Shirazi. He was born in Shiraz, the chief city of Fars, which was then ruled by atabegs of the Salghurid dynasty. The year is uncertain: going by the poet’s own lines in the “Gulistan” about fifty years gone by, most scholars date his birth to about 1209–1210, while others argue for 1213–1219. The pen name most likely declares his loyalty to the Salghurid house, two of whose rulers bore the name Sa'd.

His father gave him his first lessons and died while Saadi was still a boy. As a teenager, probably around 1223–1224, he went to Baghdad to study and for a time held a stipend at the Nizamiyya madrasa. Among his teachers he names the Baghdad preacher Abu’l-Faraj ibn al-Jawzi, whom scholars identify as the grandson of the famous theologian of that name. His teachings also show a kinship with those of the Sufi master Shihab al-Din Umar Suhrawardi.

Some thirty years of travel followed his studies. In the “Bustan” and the “Gulistan” Saadi tells, in the first person, of being taken prisoner by the Crusaders in Syria, of an adventure in an Indian temple and of a meeting in Kashgar, yet many of these tales are literary inventions. Homa Katouzian concludes that the poet very probably visited Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Arabia, but is unlikely to have reached Khorasan, India or Kashgar.

Around 1257 Saadi came back to Shiraz already a famous poet, his ghazals having travelled far ahead of him. Late that year he finished the “Bustan” and dedicated it to the ruler of Fars, the atabeg Abu Bakr ibn Sa'd; in 1258 he completed the “Gulistan”, a book of prose interspersed with verse, presented to Abu Bakr and his son Sa'd. When the Mongols took Baghdad in that same year and put to death the last Abbasid caliph, al-Musta'sim, he mourned the catastrophe in two qasidas, one in Arabic and one in Persian.

The Salghurids soon lost their hold: Abu Bakr died in 1260, his son twelve days later, and Shiraz passed under the Mongol Ilkhanate. Saadi addressed poems to local rulers, to Mongol governors and to their Persian officials, the Juvayni brothers among them, yet these read less as panegyrics than as counsel on just government. He apparently never held a post at court and, according to the sources, lived in a Sufi lodge (khanqah).

His last datable poem is addressed to an official who served in Shiraz in 1287–1289. Saadi died in Shiraz in 1291 or 1292: Zabihollah Safa dates his death to December 1291, Saeed Nafisi to 9 December 1292. His tomb in the city was restored in the 18th century by Karim Khan Zand. His collected works, the “Kulliyat”, were put in order in 1326 and 1334 by a fellow townsman, Ali ibn Ahmad Bisutun.

Saadi’s books crossed the borders of the Persian-speaking world early on. In 1391 Sayf Sarayi translated the “Gulistan” into Kipchak Turkic; in the madrasas of Central Asia the “Gulistan” and the “Bustan” were read as textbooks, Alisher Navoi wrote twenty-two ghazals in imitation of Saadi in his Persian divan, and in the 19th century Ogahiy translated the “Gulistan” into Uzbek. Europe came to know the poet through André du Ryer’s partial French translation (1634) and Adam Olearius’s German one (1654).