Sa'di

The Poet of Life, Love and Compassion

Homa Katouzian

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781780742014

One of greatest Persian writers of both classical prose and poetry, Sa'di was revered in his time as a man of great wisdom and passion. Sometimes said to have lived over one hundred years, the body of his work was written in the thirteenth century. Filled with extracts of the poet's melodious and insightful writing, and critical analysis thereof, this revealing biography examines why he was so idolised until the 1950s, and why since then he has fallen into relative obscurity. Focussing on the themes of both physical and spiritual love stitched through Sa'di's writing, as well as the impact of his many years travelling, Katouzian sheds a unique insight on who he calls 'the poet of life, love and compassion'.

SA‘DI, THE CLASSICS AND THE MODERNS

Sa‘di is a poet and writer of the seventh century hijra, the thirteenth century of the Christian era, and is one of the greatest classical Persian writers both in prose and poetry. Until the 1940s his Golestan was taught to school children as a model of perfect prose, and his Bustan was regarded as a guidebook to a moral and virtuous life, much as Aristotle’s Ethics was regarded in Victorian England. However, not unlike Iranian views in other fields, opinion changed abruptly and drastically in the second half of the twentieth century. Sa‘di went out of fashion, and his cult of worship was replaced even more strongly by that of Hafiz. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau might have asked, “How did this change come about?”

Sa‘di’s impact on later poets and writers has been very great, and certainly until the early twentieth century he was universally regarded as the greatest Persian poet of all time. Sa‘di and, following him, Hafiz are among the leading stars in the old classical traditions of Persian poetry which began in the tenth and ended in the fifteenth century. From then until the late eighteenth century various new genres and styles emerged, which reached their peak in the so-called Indian style of poetry. This new style, with its emphasis on complex images and metaphors, was refreshing at first and produced at least one outstanding poet comparable to the old classics, i.e. Sa’eb Tabrizi, but time was not on its side. It also suffered from a relative lack of patronage from the ruling Safavid dynasty. Therefore, by the end of the eighteenth century this new style of literature had declined to a level not previously experienced in Persian poetry. This led to a reversion to the old classical styles, a movement which became known as “the literary restoration” and launched the neo-classical styles of the nineteenth century. In this new wave of Persian literature Sa‘di cast a long and wide shadow, and virtually all of his works were imitated more or less successfully by poets and writers of the Restoration.

Thus, in the nineteenth century, Sa‘di came to be regarded as the leading Persian poet of all time and the greatest hero of Persian literature. In a footnote to his Hajji Baba of Isfahan, written in the early nineteenth century, James Morier described Sa‘di as “Persia’s national poet.” Morier was neither a literary critic nor a scholar of Persian literature, and this description undoubtedly reflects what he had heard about Sa‘di in Iran.

Of the other classical poets, Hafiz was also greatly admired, and his followers enjoyed reading his poetry while trying to find answers to questions which they would formulate before even opening his book of lyrics, what in Persian is described as fal-e Hafiz and is still as popular as ever. Rumi was often described as Molla-ye Rum, and was more admired for being a Sufi star than a great poet. It is not surprising, therefore, that readings from his works were largely based on his Mathnavi-ye Ma‘navi rather than his voluminous divan of lyrics which, although still mystical, are of the highest quality as pure poetry. Ferdowsi was popular for the myths and legends of his Shahnameh, which were often recited by the local reciting masters, or naqqals, in public places, although he was not normally put at the same level as the first three. Nezami Ganjavi was sometimes added to this list of poets, so that some nineteenth- and twentieth-century classical scholars put him next to Ferdowsi as the fifth member of the galaxy of stars of classical Persian poetry. Khayyam was virtually unknown until his translation by Fitzgerald made him famous in the West and also, in time, in Iran. There was, therefore, no disagreement about the Big Three leading classical poets, while many of the literati added Ferdowsi to make the Big Four, and some included Nezami in the Big Five.

As noted, however, Sa‘di topped the list and was regarded as the hero par excellence of the history of Persian literature. This was no doubt also the reason why Fath‘ali Akhundzadeh (d. 1878), the Azebaijani Iranian who was a subject of the Russian empire and lived in Georgia, launched an attack on Sa‘di in his general onslaught on Persian poetry. He was perhaps the first nationalist and modernist Iranian intellectual, and he rejected virtually the whole of post-Islamic Iranian culture, romantically glorified the legacy of ancient Persia, and wished to turn Iran into a Western-European-style country overnight. At the time hardly anyone noticed his vehement campaigns but gradually he came to influence greatly the radical nationalist-modernist intellectuals of the early twentieth century and, through them, the official romantic nationalism and pseudo-modernism of the Pahlavi era.

In his essay qeretika (which is a corruption of “critica”) Akhundzadeh used the publication of the divan of Sorush-e Isfahani – a notable poet of the time, although by no means a great poet – as a pretext for launching his general attack on Persian poetry. However, it was no accident that he mentioned Sa‘di in particular, precisely because of his exalted reputation. Akhundzadeh, like Ahmad Kasravi after him, only excluded Ferdowsi from his general repudiation of Persian poets purely because he had written Shahnameh, the book of epics and romances of ancient Persia. In other words, their approval of Shahnameh was purely instrumental – for Akhundzadeh, because it glorified ancient Persia; for Kasravi, because it was all about “history,” and promoted courage and chivalry as opposed to love and mysticism.¹

Still, Sa‘di remained the hero of Persian poetry well into the twentieth century. In the chaos which gripped Iran after the Constitutional Revolution, and especially after World War I, various diagnoses were being made about the origins of the country’s maladies. In 1920 an article appeared entitled “The School of Sa‘di” that blamed improper education and lax public morals as the root cause of all the country’s problems, and Sa‘di in particular for much of them. Once again the reason for identifying Sa‘di as the main culprit was his great popularity and the fact that his works, especially Golestan, were standard school texts for reading Persian language and literature. A full-scale debate broke out in the journals of the classicist Poet Laureate, Bahar – Daneshkadeh, in Tehran – and the modernist Taqi Raf‘at – Tajaddod, in Tabriz – on the necessity and implications of a “literary revolution” by which they meant a revolution in poetry. In one of his more reasonable arguments Raf‘at pointed out that Sa‘di’s ideas were great for his time but that they were not very helpful for finding solutions to contemporary social problems. The anti-Sa‘di campaign lost its momentum once again.²

To a considerable extent the 1920s and 1930s were the age of Ferdowsi. Never before had he been regarded with such adulation now that the glorification of ancient Persia had become a part of the official creed. It peaked in the large international Ferdowsi conference in 1934 which was ceremoniously concluded by the opening of his newly reconstructed tomb in Tus. Nevertheless a conference of leading Iranian scholars celebrated Sa‘di and his works in 1937 on the occasion of the seven-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Golestan. Kasravi who – despite his relative regard for Ferdowsi had strongly disapproved of the conference held in his honour – believed, though not very convincingly, that an equally large international conference had been intended to honour Sa‘di but that because of his campaign against it they had settled for the domestic conference.

The conference showed that the traditional cult of worship of Sa‘di was as strong as ever. One leading scholar declared that “Sa‘di means Persian poetry.” Ferdowsi and Hafiz were still thought of highly, but it was considered that Sa‘di’s poetry belonged to a different order. Another scholar called him “the greatest poet of all poets.” Yet another, after mentioning Ferdowsi, Rumi and Hafiz, said “but the collected works of Sa‘di is a treasure which knows no value or price.” A fourth speaker described him as “the Lord of Word, the greatest appreciation of whom will be to mention his name and say no more.” He added that Sa‘di was the greatest poet of all time both in East and West. And there was more.³

In 1940, Mohammad Ali Forughi, the prominent scholar, philosopher and politician, published his standard edition of Sa‘di’s collected works. It contains in its introduction the most elegant, the most eloquent and the most precise version of the traditional adulation of Sa‘di and his works. Forughi was a learned scholar, but it is difficult to detect an element of modern criticism in his comments, despite the high standard of his study as a work of scholarship.

The hatred and vilification of Sa‘di that began in the 1950s and peaked in the 1970s, and has begun to decline in recent years, must be viewed against the background of this uncritical adulation. This is especially significant as Iranians are not well known for moderate, deliberate and critical approaches in their views and assessments of any subject – literary, political or social. Kasravi’s attacks on Sa‘di in the early 1940s were not very effective at first, although they must have made an impact when the growing anti-Sa‘di campaign began ten years later. Kasravi was opposed to all literature, but especially poetry, and lyrical and mystical poetry in particular, as well as anything that he believed was pessimistic and would loosen morals and discourage the struggle for a better life. Thus Khayyam was also included on his blacklist, and only Ferdowsi was – to some extent – excused. But the main culprits according to Kasravi were the three greatest Persian lyricists: Sa‘di, Rumi and Hafiz.⁴ His views offended classical scholars to the extent that Poet Laureate Bahar wrote a couple of lampoons against him. But they did indirectly encourage the modernists, though for reasons which were different from his own; although it is hard to believe, they had slowly begun to discover, as they believed, that Persian poetry did not exist before Nima Yushij, the founder of modernist poetry in the twentieth century. The poetry written for a thousand years before him was at best pure versification and at worst worthless nonsense.

It was in the 1950s that the battle lines were drawn between the supporters and opponents of Nima and modernist poetry. Once again there was extremism on both sides and much blood was spilt in the process. By the early 1960s the modernist denunciation of contemporary non-modernist poetry – i.e. poetry written in classical, neo-classical as well as modern (but not modernist) styles – was beginning to turn into the belief, as noted, that Nima was the first ever Persian poet. By the end of that decade this view had become almost universal among modernist-leftist intellectuals, poets and writers. Among the classical greats Sa‘di and Ferdowsi became objects of ridicule and denigration.

Still in the 1960s a movement arose that claimed that Hafiz was, if not the greatest, then one of the greatest poets in human history. The cult of Hafiz rose even beyond that of Sa‘di before him, while the star of Ferdowsi fell to a nadir because of the belief that he was somehow the ideologue of the contemporary imperial system. But the clear contradiction, of how such a great poet as Hafiz could have emerged in the fourteenth century in a country in which there had been no other poets until the twentieth century, was not explained. Many commentators did not read Hafiz, whom they worshipped, any more than they read Sa‘di or Ferdowsi, whom they denied and disparaged. Both sentiments were essentially emotional and uncritical.

There was a debate in the 1940s, when Sa‘di was still popular, on whether he or Hafiz was the greatest Persian poet. The Tudeh party critics at the time came down on Sa‘di’s side because he had written on society and advocated social justice. This attitude, as we saw, changed in the fifties and sixties, and especially in the seventies, which experienced a high tide of irrationalism in Iran, as in other countries, to the extent that young school teachers, virtually all of whom subscribed to one or another leftist ideology, used to turn the page over in the school textbooks whenever they came across a piece by Sa‘di. To a considerable extent this was a backlash against the academic classicists’ great regard for Sa‘di, so that he was increasingly viewed as a symbol of the academic literary establishment in a similar way as Ferdowsi was seen as a symbol of the political establishment. But the rise of leftist irrationalism and emotionalism also played a role, despite the fact that leftist ideologies had been firmly rooted in nineteenth-century rationalist thought.⁵ At any rate, literary criticism as distinct from pure scholarship and/or exaltation and vilification has not been a strong point in Iranian culture and history.

The decline of interest in Sa‘di among western scholars of the twentieth century was partly due to the decline of classical as opposed to modern studies, and partly the result of Sa‘di’s unfashionable status among the moderns in Iran. Europe had discovered Sa‘di in the seventeenth century when his Golestan was translated into French, German and Latin. In the eighteenth century, translations into English and other western European languages introduced him to the literary public and led to his increasing popularity among the literati and intellectuals. It is not surprising that he was appreciated in the Age of Reason and Enlightenment by its leading figures such as Voltaire, and that Carnot, the French revolutionary leader and organizer of the revolution’s defence against foreign invasion, named his son after him, who in turn became a world-famous mathematician. But even Herder, a leading light in the German Counter-Enlightenment movement and philosophical romanticism also thought of Sa‘di as “the pleasant teacher of morals.”

A recent western study has described Sa‘di as a Persian humanist.⁶ It especially cites examples of Sa‘di’s religious toleration as evidence for his humanism, although the requirements of both religious and non-religious types of European humanism go well beyond that, unless the term is employed not in its strict historical sense. Furthermore, as noted, Sa‘di had a strong appeal both for the Enlightenment (rationalist) and the Counter-Enlightenment (romantic) thinkers of the eighteenth century. That also puts in balance the view that the decline of European interest in Sa‘di and the appeal of Hafiz began with the rise of romanticism in the nineteenth century: Sa‘di, as we saw, had also appealed to philosophical romantics. Hafiz’s appeal to nineteenth-century thinkers and literati was not so great, with the major exception of Goethe who, however, had shed much of his romanticism by the time he took a strong interest in Hafiz. Hafiz may be described as a romantic only in the broadest of terms, if by romanticism we have in mind the philosophical and literary movement which began in Europe in the eighteenth century and came to maturity in the nineteenth. If, in this broad sense of romanticism, love plays an important role then Sa‘di’s claim to romanticism should be at least equally as strong as that of Hafiz.

Yet it is true that Sa‘di’s reputation in Europe was almost completely based on translations of Golestan and (much less) Bustan, and that – in particular – hardly any attention was paid to him as a great poet of love songs.⁷ More translations of Golestan appeared in the nineteenth century and Sa‘di became a well-known figure among the orientalists. Western interest in Sa‘di and his works declined dramatically in the twentieth century, excepting a few critical studies and translations, apart from the general coverage of his works in literary histories and textbooks.⁸

What will happen in the future is not predictable now that Rumi has become popular with the general public in the West, much as Khayyam had done in the late nineteenth century, and that Hafiz still holds much of the attention of western scholars of classical Persian poetry. However that may be, and despite his past fame and fortune, Sa‘di is still a largely undiscovered treasure in his own land and the world at large.

LIFE AND WORKS

What is certain about Sa‘di’s life is that he flourished in the thirteenth century CE (seventh century hijra), went to the Nezamiyeh College of Baghdad, travelled wide and lived long. It is clear from his love poetry that he was an ardent lover, and from much of his works that he was not a Sufi although he cherished the ideals of Sufism and admired the legendary classical Sufis. Not much else can be said about his life with the same degree of certainty.

In his introduction to Bustan, Sa‘di wrote about some of his experiences. Here we learn that he had travelled far and wide and spent time with all manner of people, but for sincerity and generosity he had found nobody like the people of Shiraz. He believed that traditionally travellers, on returning home, normally brought sugar as a gift from Egypt. On his own return home Sa‘di wrote:

If I could not afford to bring sugar

I can offer words that are even sweeter

Thus he offered Bustan as a homecoming present to his fellow citizens. It is clear from the introduction as well as the text that Sa‘di had spent many years travelling and seeing the world. In Golestan there are many tales and anecdotes which speak of the places the narrator has been to and of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• PREFACE
• 1 SA‘DI, THE CLASSICS AND THE MODERNS
• 2 LIFE AND WORKS
• 3 SONGS OF LOVE AND ODES TO BEAUTY
• 4 REALITY AND APPEARANCE: MYSTICISM AND LOGIC
• 5 TEACHING MANNERS AND MORALS
• 6 THE WAYS OF SHAHS AND VIZIERS
• CONCLUDING REMARKS
• Endnotes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index