Beholding Beauty

One of the most celebrated authors of medieval Iran, Saʿdī Shīrāzī (d. 691/1292) is best known to many for his Gulistān (The Rose Garden), a prosimetrum that meditates on how the individual can navigate a path through political, spiritual and romantic relationships, and face mortality with grace. After its release in 656/1258, the Gulistān began to be fêted for its eloquence and the ethical ideas that it was perceived to espouse, to the extent that it became a core element of school curricula across Iran, Central Asia and South Asia, and a major site of intertextual reference, from the medieval period until modern times. Like much of Saʿdī’s verse, the Gulistān was originally written for Saʿdī’s main patrons, the Salghurid Atabaks of Fars, who were absorbed through a mixture of political alliances and coercion into the Mongol Ilkhanate during the second half of the thirteenth century. It was against the backdrop of the Mongol incursions, and the fall of Baghdad in 656/1258, that Saʿdī lived, travelled and wrote

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