Muslehuddin Saadi al-Shiraz

Shakyh Muslehuddin "Saadi" (also known as Saadi al-Shiraz) was born in the year 1184 A. 6 in the city of Shiraz, Iran, He belonged to a respectable, cultured family who greatly valued education with the result that Saadi received the best training possible in literature and religious knowledge.


He was very devoted to religion and was given to the contemplation of religious subjects early in life. He tells a story about himself, of how as a child, he used to pray long hours at night to ask forgiveness from God for the sins of erring humanity. One day his father noticed his long, earnest nightly preoccupation’s in prayer and asked him what he was doing. "is it not better that you think of your own sins first!" asked his father.

Since that lesson, "Saadi" never ceased examining his life in all its facets and contemplating lives of human beings.

He devoted, according to himself, the first forty years of his life to frivolous activities, after which he seriously tackled the task of digesting the education he had received and then to observe life's problems.

"Saadi" was a great traveller and undertook long journeys of adventure to various parts of the world, observing, studying and making notes on people and places and carefully recording his impressions and experiences for future use. He was quite at home in the company of kings and ministers, of saints and literary men, of rich and the poor. He enriched his experiences from all of them.

He visited India where he stayed in a Hindu temple in the city of Delhi, and moved around the country observing the religious and social customs of the people and learning their language to understand them better.

He was an infatigable traveller who was on the move most of the time. He visited Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Abyssinia, North West Africa, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan etc etc. These travels were undertaken unhurriedly and "Saadi" was able to spend long periods at places that took his fancy. He thus spent from a few months to a number of years in various places in the world. In Damascus and Balbek, for instance, "Saadi" stayed long enough to become a well known Khatieb; but tiring of that life, he left to go to Palestine where he began to live the life of a hermit away from inhabited regions. Here, according to him, he was captured by some Franks, who sold him as a slave to the Jews. A citizen of Aleppo took fancy to him and ransomed him for ten dinars, and offered a hundred more to him if he would marry his daughter! "Saadi" readily accepted the offer and married the girl. But she proved to be a very shrewish wife, making his life a misery. "Saadi" divorced her and went wandering again.

He eventually returned to his native Shiraz, and began writing the books which made him famous in the world of Persian literature. His most well known works are two books entitled: Gulistan.' The Garden of Roses and Bustan. The Garden of Fragrance. These books are written partly in prose and partly in verse, and contain hundreds of stories concerning people and places. They record the adventures and incidents he experienced; the humour, the pathos and the tragedies he observed.

He was a man of the people with strong sympathies for the common man. He recorded stories about people and those who ruled over them in beautiful prose and verse, often drawing a moral lesson from each one of them. Most of his stories are told light-heartedly in the conversational style of a born story-teller, illustrated expertly with delightful flights in poetry.

"Saadi" died in Shiraz, in the year 1291 A.C.