Saná'í of Ghazna or Balkh, * whose proper name was Abu'l-Majd Majdúd b. Ádam, is the first of the three great mystical Saná'í. mathnawì-writers of Persia, the second being Shaykh Farídu'd-Dín 'Aṭṭár, and the third Jalálu'd-Dín Rúmí, who, though by far the greatest, had the humility to write:—

'Aṭṭár rúḥ búd, u Saná'í du chashm-i-ú;
Má az pay-i-Saná'í u 'Aṭṭár ámadím.

“'Aṭṭár was the Spirit, and Saná'í its two eyes;
We come after Saná'í and 'Aṭṭár.”

Of Saná'í's life we know very little, save that he was attached, at any rate during its earlier period, to the Court of Bahrám-sháh; for the account of his conversion from the worldly state of a Court-poet to the higher life of the mystic given by Dawlatsháh (pp. 95-97), and reproduced by Ouseley in his Lives of the Persian Poets (pp. 184-187), is not deserving of much attention, while neither his own preface to the Ḥadìqa, nor that of his disciple Muḥammad b. 'Alí Raqqám * throw much light on his circumstances, save that they tend to con­firm, as Rieu points out, the statement made by Jámí that the poet wrote the Ḥadiqa, his best-known work, in his old age, and died almost immediately after its completion in A.D. 1131. 'Awfí in his Lubàbu'l-Albáb (vol. ii, p. 252 of my edition) gives, as usual, no biographical information whatever; while certain facts to which Ethé has called attention * are in contradiction with the chronological data deducible from the prefaces to the Ḥadìqa, and tend to show that the poet survived Mu'izzí and did not die much before A.D. 1150.

Saná'í's work, so far as it has come down to us, consists of seven mathnawís and a dìwàn. Of the former the Ḥadìqatu'l-Ḥaqíqat (“Garden of Truth”) is the only one which is at all celebrated; the other six, viz., the Ṭarìqu't-Taḥqiq (“Path of Verification”), Gharìb-nàma (“Book of the Stranger”), Sayru'l-'ibàd ila'l-Ma'àd (“Pilgrimage of [God's] servants to the Hereafter”), Kàr-nàma (“Book of Deeds”), 'Ishq-nàma (“Book of Love”), and 'Aql-nàma (“Book of Reason”), are very rare, and I have never seen them. * Manuscripts of the Díwán are not common, but it has been lithographed at Ṭihrán in A.H. 1274 (= A.D. 1857-58). This edition com­prises 271 pages, each containing some 45 couplets—in all, perhaps, some twelve thousand bayts distributed amongst the qaṣìdas, tarjì'-bands, tarkìb-bands, ghazals, and quatrains which compose the whole. The Ḥadìqa is much the most frequently met with of all Saná'í's works, and there exists a very fair Oriental edition, lithographed at Bombay in A.H. 1275 (= A.D. 1859). We shall confine our remarks to it and the Dìwán.

The Ḥadìqa, dedicated to Bahrámsháh, Sulṭán of Ghazna, is a moral and ethical rather than a purely mystical poem of about eleven thousand verses, divided into ten books, the first in praise of God, the second in praise of the Prophet, the third on Reason, the fourth on the excellence of Know­ledge, the fifth on Carelessness, the sixth on the Heavens and The Ḥadíqatu'l­Ḥaqíqat. Zodiacal Signs, the seventh on Philosophy, the eighth on Love, the ninth on the poet's own condi­tion and circumstances, and the tenth in praise of Bahrámsháh, Sulṭán of Ghazna. The poem is written in a halting and unattractive metre, and is in my opinion one of the dullest books in Persian, seldom rising to the level of Martin Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy, filled with fatuous truisms and pointless anecdotes, and as far inferior to the Mathnawì of Jalálu'd-Dín Rúmí as is Robert Montgomery's Satan to Milton's Paradise Lost. The following parable, illustrating the impossibility that man should be able to form more than a partial and distorted conception of God, may be taken as, on the whole, a favourable specimen:—