Thirty years on the road
Saadi left Shiraz as a young man to study in Baghdad, then travelled for some three decades through the lands of Islam, from Syria to Arabia, meeting kings, beggars, scholars and merchants. He came home to Shiraz and turned what he had seen into two books: the Bustan, The Orchard, in verse, and the Golestan, The Rose Garden, in prose mixed with poetry.
The children of Adam
The Golestan is full of short stories with sharp, kind morals, and for centuries it was the first book Persian-speaking children studied. Its most famous lines are about our shared humanity:
بنیآدم اعضای یکدیگرند / که در آفرینش ز یک گوهرند
“All people are members of one body, created from one essence. When one member is hurt, the others cannot rest.” A carpet woven with these lines hangs in the United Nations building in New York.
The Saadieh
Saadi lies in a garden in the north of Shiraz, the Saadieh, beneath a modern pavilion of turquoise tile built in the 1950s. Beneath it is an old underground pool, once fed by a spring, where visitors used to toss coins and feed the fish.
