We come now to Sa'dí of Shíráz, the third of the great poets of this epoch, and, according to a well-known rhyme Sa'dí of Shíráz. previously quoted, one of the three “Prophets of Poetry,” the other two being Firdawsí and Anwarí. No Persian writer enjoys to this day, not only in his own country, but wherever his language is cultivated, a wider celebrity or a greater reputation. His Gulistán, or “Rose-garden,” and his Bústán, or “Orchard,” are generally the first classics to which the student of Persian is introduced, while his ghazals, or odes, enjoy a popularity second only to those of his fellow-townsman Ḥáfidh. He is a poet of quite a different type from the two already discussed in this chapter, and represents on the whole the astute, half-pious, half-worldly side of the Persian character, as the other two represent the passionately devout and mystical. Mysticism was at this time so much in the air, and its phraseology was—as it still is—so much a part of ordinary speech, that the traces of it in Sa'dí's writings are neither few nor uncertain; but in the main it may be said without hesitation that worldly wisdom rather than mysticism is his chief characteristic, and that the Gulistán in particular is one of the most Macchiavellian works in the Persian language. Pious sentiments and aspirations, indeed, abound; but they are, as a rule, eminently practical, and almost devoid of that visionary quality which is so characteristic of the essentially mystical writers.
The poet's full name appears, from the oldest known manuscript
of his works (No. 876 of the India Office, transcribed
Particulars of
Sa'dí's life.
in A.D. 1328, only thirty-seven years after his
death) to have been, not, as generally stated,
Muṣliḥu'd-Dín, but Musharrifu'd-Dín b. Muṣ-
“Protect thou the orphan whose father is dead;
Brush the mud from his dress, ward all hurt from his head.
Thou know'st not how hard his condition must be:
When the root has been cut, is there life in the tree?
Caress not and kiss not a child of thine own
In the sight of an orphan neglected and lone.
If the orphan sheds tears, who his grief will assuage?
If his temper should fail him, who cares for his rage?
O see that he weep not, for surely God's throne
Doth quake at the orphan's most pitiful moan!
With infinite pity, with tenderest care,
Wipe the tears from his eyes, brush the dust from his hair.
No shield of parental protection his head
Now shelters: be thou his protector instead!When the arms of a father my neck could enfold
Then, then was I crowned like a monarch with gold.
If even a fly should upon me alight
Not one heart but many were filled with affright,
While now should men make me a captive and thrall,
No friend would assist me or come to my call.
The sorrows of orphans full well can I share,
Since I tasted in childhood the orphan's despair.”
On his father's death, according to Dr. Ethé, whose article on Persian Literature in vol. ii (pp. 212-368) of the Grundriss
Sa'dí's education and travels. der Iranischen Philologie contains (on pp. 292-296) the best account of Sa'dí with which I am acquainted, he was taken under the protection of the Atábek of Fárs, Sa'd b. Zangí, whose accession took place in A.D. 1195, and in honour of whom the poet took the pen-name of “Sa'dí” as his nom de guerre; and shortly afterwards he was sent to pursue his studies at the celebrated Nidhámiyya College of Baghdád. This marks the beginning The first period of his life. of the first of the three periods into which Dr. Ethé divides his life, viz., the period of study, which lasted until A.D. 1226, and was spent chiefly at Baghdád. Yet even during this period he made, as appears from a story in Book v of the Gulistán, the long journey to Káshghar, which, as he tells us, he entered “in the year when Sulṭán Muḥammad Khwárazmsháh elected, on grounds of policy, to make peace with Cathay” (Khaṭá), which happened about the year A.D. 1210. Even then, as we learn from the same anecdote, his fame had preceded him to this remote outpost of Islám in the north-east, a fact notable not merely as showing that he had succeeded in establishing his reputation at the early age of twenty-six, but as confirming what I have already endeavoured to emphasise as to the rapidity with which knowledge and news were at this time transmitted throughout the realms of Islám.While at Baghdád he came under the influence of the eminent Ṣúfí Shaykh Shihábu'd-Dín Suhrawardí (died in A.D. 1234), of whose deep piety and unselfish love of his fellow-creatures Sa'dí speaks in one of the anecdotes in the Bústán. Shamsu'd-Dín Abu'l-Faraj ibnu'l-Jawzí, as we learn from an anecdote in Book ii of the Gulistán, was another of the eminent men by whose instruction he profited in his youth.
The second period of Sa'dí's life, that of his more extensive
travels, begins, according to Dr. Ethé, in A.D. 1226, in which
The second
period.
year the disturbed condition of Fárs led him to
quit Shíráz (whither he had returned from Bagh-
“O knowest thou not why, an outcast and exile,
In lands of the stranger a refuge I sought?
Disarranged was the world like the hair of a negro
When I fled from the Turks and the terror they brought.
Though outwardly human, no wolf could surpass them
In bloodthirsty rage or in sharpness of claw;
Though within was a man with the mien of an angel,
Without was a host of the lions of war.
At peace was the land when again I beheld it;
E'en lions and leopards were wild but in name.
Like that was my country what time I forsook it,
Fulfilled with confusion and terror and shame:
Like this in the time of 'Bú Bakr the Atábek
I found it when back from my exile I came.”
Sa'dí's return to his native town of Shíráz, to which he alludes in the last couplet of the above poem, took place in The third period. A.D. 1256, which marks the beginning of the third period of his life, that, namely, in which his literary activity chiefly fell. A year after his return, in A.D. 1257, he published his celebrated mathnawí poem the Bústán, and a year later the Gulistán, a collection of anecdotes, drawn from the rich stores of his observation and experience, with ethical reflections and maxims of worldly wisdom based thereon, written in prose in which are embedded numerous verses. Both these books are so well known, and have been translated so often into so many languages, that it is unnecessary to discuss them at length in this place.*
We have already said that Sa'dí's travels were very extensive. In the course of them he visited Balkh, Ghazna, the Panjál Somnáth, Gujerat, Yemen, the Ḥijáz and other parts of Arabia, Abyssinia, Syria, especially Damascus and Baalbekk (Ba'labakk), North Africa, and Asia Minor. He travelled, in true dervish-fashion, in all sorts of ways, and mixed with all sorts of people: in his own writings (especially the Gulistán) he appears now painfully stumbling after the Pilgrim Caravan through the burning deserts of Arabia, now bandying jests with a fine technical flavour of grammatical terminology with schoolboys at Káshghar, now a prisoner in the hands of the Franks, condemned to hard labour in the company of Jews in the Syrian town of Tripoli, now engaged in investigating the mechanism of a wonder-working Hindoo idol in the Temple of Somnáth, and saving his life by killing the custodian who discovered him engaged in this pursuit. * This last achievement he narrates with the utmost sang froid as follows:—
“The door of the Temple I fastened one night,
Then ran like a scorpion to left and to right;
Next the platform above and below to explore
I began, till a gold-broidered curtain I saw,
And behind it a priest of the Fire-cult * did stand
With the end of a string firmly held in his hand.