The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
IN or around the year 1210 a poet was born in the Persian city of Shiraz. Not unlike now, those years were a moment of transformation in the Muslim world. Mongol expansion had led to the fall of many cities and dynasties. It was in this atmosphere of fear and change that the young poet grew up. Before long, he left to travel the Western Islamic world and took the pen name ‘Sa’adi’ by which he is known even today.
The selection of the name was a homage to the Salghurid Atabegs who ruled Shiraz at the time and in particular to Abu Bakr bin Sa’ad. When Sa’adi returned to Shiraz in or around 1257, he immediately set about writing. In the year 1258, Shaikh Muslih al Din Sa’adi took his work Gulistan of Sa’adi and presented it to the ruling family. Historians note that ever since it was written, the Gulistan was the first book to be studied by schoolchildren in the Persian-speaking world and far