Saadi Shirazi's Scroll of Wisdom E-Book

Arthur Naylor Wollaston

• Herausgeber: Edizioni Aurora Boreale
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Abu-Muhammad Muslih Al-Din bin Abdallah Shirazi, better known by his pen-name Saadi, or Saadi of Shiraz (Saadi Shirazi), was the major Persian poet and prose writer during the Middle Age. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest poets of the classical literary tradition, earning him the nickname “Master” or “Master of Speech”. He has been quoted in the Western traditions as well, sand his Bustan is universally considered one of the houndred greatest books of all time.
In addition to the Bustan and the Gulistan, his masterworks, Saadi also wrote four books of love poems (ghazals), and number of longer mono-rhyme poems (qasidas) in both Persian and Arabic, including the Pand Namah, or Scroll of Wisdom, the small volume of poetry that we present today in this new edition, faithful to the version edited and published by Arthur Naylor Wollaston in New York in 1906.

Leseprobe

The House of Wisdom

ARTHUR NAYLOR WOLLASTON

SAADI SHIRAZI’S

SCROLL OF WISDOM

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Title: Sadi’s Scroll of Wisdom

Author: Arthur Naylor Wollaston

Series: Telestèrion

With a preface by Nicola Bizzi

Editing and illustrations by Nicola Bizzi

ISBN e-book version: 978-88-98635-65-8

Edizioni Aurora Boreale

© 2019 Edizioni Aurora Boreale

Via del Fiordaliso 14 - 59100 Prato - Italia

[email protected]

www.auroraboreale-edizioni.com

PREFACE

«When in the eyes of the beloved riches count not,

gold and dust are as one to thee».

(Saadi Shirazi, Bustan)

Sir Arthur Naylor Wollaston was one of the most famous British orientalists. He was born in Beulah Hill, Upper Norwood (London) on October 14, 1848, son of Henry Francis Wollaston, and died in London on February 8 1922. He was the author of important historical, ethnographic and linguistic works, including An English-Persian Dictionary (1882), Half hours with Muhammad (1886), The Miracle play of Hasan and Huisain (1879), Muhammad: His life and doctrines with accounts of his immediate successors (1904), The Sword of Islam (1905) and The Religion of the Koran (1910). He also made translations and editions of important texts related to the Muslim world, including The Anwar-i-Suhailí, or Lights of Canopus (1877) and Sadi’s Scroll of Wisdom (1906), the collection of poems by the great Persian author Saadi Shirazi, which today we have the honor to present to the public in this new edition, in our publishing series The House of Wisdom.

Abu-Muhammad Muslih Al-Din bin Abdallah Shirazi, better known by his pen-name Saadi, or simply Saadi of Shiraz (Saadi Shirazi) was the major Persian poet and prose writer during the Middle Age. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest poets of the classical literary tradition, earning him the nickname “Master” or “Master of Speech”. He has been quoted in the Western traditions as well, sand his Bustan is universally considered one of the houndred greatest books of all time.

Saadi was born in Shiraz, Iran, according to some sorce, shortly after 1200, according to others sometime between 1213 and 1219. In the Golestan, one of his masterworks, composed in 1258, he says in lines evidently addressed to himself, «O you who have lived fifty years and are still asleep». Another piece of evidence is that in one of his qasida poems he writes that he left home for foreign lands when the Mongols came to his homeland Fars, an event which occurred in 1225. It seems that his father died when he was a child. After leaving Shiraz he enrolled at the famous Nizamiyya University in Baghdad, where he studied Islamic Sciences, Law, Governance, History, Persian Literature, and Islamic Theology; it appears that he had a scholarship to study there. In the Golestan, he tells us that he studied under the scholar Abu’l-Faraj ibn Al-Jawzi (presumably the younger of two scholars of that name, who died in 1238).

In the Bustan and in the Golestan Saadi tells many colourful anecdotes of his travels, although some of these, such as his supposed visit to the remote eastern city of Kashgar in 1213, may be fictional or esoterically symbolic. The unsettled conditions following the Mongol invasion of Khwarezm and Iran led him to wander for thirty years abroad through Anatolia (where he visited Konya and the Port of Adana), Syria (where he mentions the famine in Damascus), Egypt (where he describes its music, bazaars, clerics and elites), and Iraq (where he visits the port of Basra and the Tigris river). In his writings he mentions the qadis and the muftis of Al-Azhar, the grand bazaar, music and art. At Halab, Saadi joins a group of Sufis who had fought arduous battles against the Crusaders.

Saadi was captured by Crusaders at Acre where he spent seven years as a slave digging trenches outside its fortress. He was later released after the Mamluks paid ransom for Muslim prisoners being held in Crusader dungeons.

After his release, Saadi visited Jerusalem and then set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. It is believed that he may have also visited Oman and other lands in the south of the Arabian Peninsula.

Because of the Mongol invasions he was forced to live in desolate areas and met caravans fearing for their lives on once-lively silk trade routes. Saadi lived in isolated refugee camps where he met bandits, Imams, men who formerly owned great wealth or commanded armies, intellectuals, and ordinary people. While Mongol and European sources (such as the Venetian Marco Polo) gravitated to the potentates and courtly life of Ilkhanate rule, Saadi mingled with the ordinary survivors of the war-torn region. He sat in remote tea houses late into the night and exchanged views with merchants, farmers, preachers, wayfarers, thieves, and Sufi mendicants. For twenty years or more, he continued the same schedule of preaching, advising, and learning, honing his sermons to reflect the wisdom and foibles of his people. Saadi’s works reflect upon the lives of ordinary Iranians suffering displacement, agony and conflict during the turbulent times of the Mongol invasion.