Sa’diy of Shiraz and “Guliston”

Sheikh Muslihiddin Sa’diy of Shiraz was a great poet of Persian-Tajik literature; as his pen name shows, he was from Shiraz, the famous city in Iran. Sources give different birth years (1184, 1189, 1203, 1210), so we do not state one; he died in 1292. Sa’diy spent more than twenty years travelling, knew the hardships of exile and even captivity, and put what he saw and learned into stories. He wrote wise ghazals; one famous ghazal begins with the words “O caravan leader, go slowly”. His main works are “Bo‘ston”, written in 1257, and “Guliston”, written in 1258. Western scholars such as Voltaire and Goethe also turned to his works.