Sa‘di

Persian writer

• Born: c. 1200
• Birthplace: Shīrāz, Persia (now in Iran)
• Died: c. 1291
• Place of death: Shīrāz, Persia (now in Iran)

Saՙdi’s literary works, particularly his worldly-wise and entertaining classics, The Orchard and The Rose Garden, have made him one of the leading writers of Iran, where he is fondly known as Shaykh Saՙdi or simply the Shaykh.

Following his university studies, Saՙdi entered on the second of three main periods in his life, each of which represented a drastic change. He now began a period of wandering and adventure that, by the standard accounts, lasted for some thirty years. What motivated him to take to the road is not known, but it could have been any of a number of things his desire to leave university life, the appeal of roaming, the influence of the dervishes or Sufis, or the approach of the conquering Mongol hordes. The Mongols, known as “the Scourge of Islam,” were then devastating whole territories, leaving mountains of skulls piled up outside burned cities. In strange ways, Saՙdi’s fate intertwined with theirs, much as his achievement stands in opposition to what they represented. If the Mongols caused him to flee, they thereby brought about the period of wandering that constituted his real education and the source of his wisdom.

Life’s Work

Saՙdi’s travels ranged throughout the Muslim lands, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, Anatolia (now Turkey), Palestine, Egypt, and other parts of North Africa. He visited the holy city of Mecca in Arabia numerous times. Sometimes he stayed with or traveled in the company of dervishes, members of the mystical Sufi fraternal orders, then at their height in the Islamic world. It is possible that he joined one of the Sufi orders for a time, even if his easygoing, skeptical temperament was not really compatible with Sufi discipline and emotionalism (ecstasy induced by various practices such as chanting or whirling to celebrate an all-embracing love). He did enjoy the singing, dancing, and company. Wandering about as a mendicant dervish also enabled him to travel more safely and to get handouts and hospitality, sometimes by preaching sermons that were good practice for writing his great didactic works.

Early Life

Like the expedient morality of his writings, the facts of the life of Saՙdi (sah-DEE) are difficult to pin down. Much information about him is available but untrustworthy; most of it tends to be legendary or to come from autobiographical passages in his writings, where Saՙdi indulged the common human impulse to invent or correct oneself and in addition needed to make his stories fit his points (though not all do). As one of his characters puts it, “a man who has seen the world utters much falsehood.” Moreover, G. M. Wickens, one of his translators, warns that “Saՙdi is most often portrayed with shrewd and subtle features, enlivened by a wicked, enigmatic smile.” The intermingling of fact, fiction, and uncertainty about Saՙdi leaves his biography undependable but ontologically correct because his main point is that one can never “know” oneself, anybody else, or anything with certainty.

Not even Saՙdi’s real name is certain. The best opinion is that his true name was Mosharrif al-Dīn ibn Moṣliḥ al-Dīn or some variation of this (sometimes with “Abdullah” or “Saՙdi Shirazi” tacked on). Saՙdi is a takhallus (pen name) taken from the rulers of Fārs Province during Saՙdi’s lifetime Saՙd ibn Zangi, his son Abū Bakr ibn Saՙd, and his grandson Saՙd ibn Abū Bakr. In Persian, which uses the Arabic alphabet, the name Saՙdi contains an ayn, a separate sound or tightening of the throat for which there is no exact equivalent in English. To indicate this pronunciation, the name is sometimes transliterated as “Saadi.”

Saՙdi was born in Fārs Province, a southern region whose ancient name, Persis, the early Greeks extended to all Iran (which was thus known in the West until recently as Persia). As this etymology suggests, Fārs Province has played a central role in Iranian history, and such was especially the case during Saՙdi’s lifetime. Saՙdi’s father was a minor official at the court of the provincial ruler, Saՙd ibn Zangi. When Saՙdi’s father died, Saՙd ibn Zangi assumed responsibility for the young Saՙdi’s care and education. After schooling in Shīrāz, Saՙdi attended Nizamiya College in Baghdad, then perhaps the world’s best educational institution. According to some accounts, Saՙdi spent his time there carousing and having a good time. In the Bustan (1257; The Orchard, 1882),

His travels were naturally not without incident and occasionally perilous adventure. For example, in the Gulistan (1258; The Rose Garden, 1806), Saՙdi says that he was captured in Palestine by Christian Crusaders and put to work digging moats. What most offended him about the experience was that the other prisoners in his work gang were “infidels” (or “Jews,” depending on the translation); unfortunately, Saՙdi displays the typical Muslim bigotry of his time. Eventually, a friend from Aleppo came by, recognized Saՙdi, and ransomed him from the Crusaders for ten dinars. Then the friend gave his daughter to Saՙdi in marriage, along with a dowry of one hundred dinars. His new wife proved so mean, however, that soon Saՙdi was wishing himself back among the Christians and Jews. When she pointedly reminded him of how her father had saved him, Saՙdi replied that it had cost her father only ten dinars to ransom him from the Crusaders but a hundred dinars to marry him to her. Later Saՙdi might have married another woman in Arabia, where they had a child who died. There is no indication of what happened to either woman or that either returned with him to Iran; it is possible that he left them both behind.

Outside Muslim territory, Saՙdi seems to have traveled in Armenia and possibly India, though his travel in India has been disputed. In The Orchard, Saՙdi tells how he got into trouble in India over religion. While watching a temple crowd worship an idol, he commented on the crowd’s superstition to a friend. The friend, who turned out to be a believer himself, angrily got up and denounced Saՙdi to the crowd, which became ugly. Saՙdi saved himself by pretending to be an ignorant foreigner eager to learn more about their worship. The head Brahman instructed Saՙdi by making him spend all night with the statue, and the next morning the statue rewarded Saՙdi and other worshipers by raising its hands in salute. Apologizing and kissing the statue, Saՙdi claimed to be convinced, but a few days later he slipped behind the scenes and caught the Brahman operating levers that raised the statue’s hands. Saՙdi says that he killed the Brahman by throwing him down a well and dropping a rock onto his head. Then Saՙdi got out of India as fast as he could.

Such incidents might have helped persuade Saՙdi, sometime during the 1250’, to enter his third major phase to return to Shīrāz and take up a life of seclusion and writing. In addition, as his introduction to The Rose Garden shows, Saՙdi was impelled by a feeling (although he had already established a literary reputation by then) that he had wasted his life and accomplished nothing of importance. Saՙdi’s retreat also coincided with another Mongol invasion of the eastern Muslim world, which could have lent urgency to his feelings by threatening both him and the world he knew. He was relatively safe, however, in Fārs Province, whose ruler, Abū Bakr ibn Saՙd, had made peace with the Mongols by submitting and paying tribute before the province was invaded. Around the time Saՙdi finished writing The Orchard and The Rose Garden, the Mongols (in January, 1258) devastated Baghdad, the center of Muslim culture for the previous five centuries, and killed its one and a half million inhabitants. Saՙdi mourned the occasion in a famous lament.

If the Islamic world had suffered a crushing blow, Saՙdi’s fortunes dramatically improved. The Orchard and The Rose Garden found an eager audience. Numerous copies were made and circulated, and Saՙdi’s literary fame spread. Abū Bakr ibn Saՙd invited him to come and stay in the court, but Saՙdi graciously declined the offer, content to live out his years in his “rose garden.” After finishing his masterpieces, Saՙdi lived on for some thirty more years, aware of his gradually diminishing literary powers but already venerated by his country folk as “the Shaykh” (wise old man). He died sometime in the early 1290’, probably in 1291.

Significance

While admiring Saՙdi as a wise old man, his Victorian translators and editors were distressed by his casual acceptance of pederasty and by his khabisat (obscene poetry and prose). Readers today might be more offended by his bigotry, especially toward Jews and blacks, and by his numerous qasidas (long poems of fulsome praise for patrons or rulers). These offending features illustrate some of the more obvious cultural barriers that stand in the way of Westerners reading Saՙdi with full understanding. More subtle barriers are posed by the allusions, imagery, and play with language, some of which cannot be translated.

Yet in his own country Saՙdi has been revered for more than seven centuries. He has entered the culture and become part of the language, much like Shakespeare in the English-speaking world. Only the Qur՚ān has been quoted more in Iran than Saՙdi, even if some Iranians now consider him old-fashioned. The British were acting on the right instincts when, during the colonial period, they adopted The Rose Garden as a Persian text for training civil servants going to India (Persian was the official language of the Moguls, who ruled parts of India before the British arrived). Anyone hoping to understand the Iranians, and indeed other groups in the Islamic world, could hardly find a better place to begin than with Saՙdi. Few writers have so thoroughly defined a culture as Saՙdi, both as the culture existed in the past and as it still to some extent persists.

Although Saՙdi’s qasidas, ghazalsGhazals> (love poems), and rubáiyát (quatrains) are relatively unknown to Westerners, The Orchard and The Rose Garden remain his main works and the most accessible ones. Both works are in the Eastern didactic tradition (not entirely unknown in the West), combining literary, folk, and religious elements. The Orchard, written in verse (the mathnavi or rhymed couplet form), is a bit more serious and formal than the lighter, looser The Rose Garden, written in prose and verse (mostly quatrains). The Rose Garden might consist of leftovers from The Orchard, since both works are blends of stories, anecdotes, homilies, maxims, and folk sayings purportedly illustrating the virtues or moral topics of the chapter headings (for example, “On Love, Intoxication, and Delirium,” “The Morals of Dervishes,” “On the Advantages of Silence”). The easy but artful mixture of material tends to grow on the reader, as does Saՙdi’s slightly warped approach to life. After all, who can resist an author who makes the scorpion say, “What renown do I have in summer that I should also come out in winter?”

Bibliography

Arberry, A. J. Classical Persian Literature. Richmond, Surrey, England: Curzon Press, 1994. One of the leading introductions, originally published in 1958, to Iran’s greatest period of literature (ninth through fifteenth centuries). The chapter on Saՙdi gives an excellent idea of his range. Includes generous quotations of his lyrical poetry in translation, a bibliography, and an index.

Levy, Reuben. An Introduction to Persian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Another good introduction to the literature of Iran, concentrating on the classical period. Includes useful information on the historical setting and Persian verse forms. Saՙdi is covered in a separate chapter with Hafiz, another writer from Shīrāz. Map, bibliography.

Saՙdi. The “Gulistan”: Or, Rose Garden of Saՙdi. Translated by Edward Rehatsek. 1888. Reprint. New York: Putnam, 1965. An excellent English translation by a nineteenth century Hungarian who traveled to India. Brief bibliography.

Saՙdi. Morals Pointed and Tales Adorned: The “Bustan” of Saՙdi. Translated by G. M. Wickens. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1974. An excellent English translation, in verse, with a brief but good introduction and a brief bibliography.

Zand, Michael I. Six Centuries of Glory: Essays on Medieval Literature of Iran and Transoxania. Translated by T. A. Zalite. Moscow: Nauka, 1967. A compact work examining Iran’s classical period of literature from a Communist point of view. The brief but interesting essay on Saՙdi comments on his treatment of social issues.