Mahmud Shabistari

Sa'd ud-Dīn Mahmūd Shabistarī was a Persian Sufi poet and scholar, born at Shabistar near Tabriz in north-western Iran. His dates are uncertain: Florence Lederer, whose translation is given here, places his birth about 1250, while other accounts put his life at about 1288 to about 1340. Little is known of his career beyond his learning in Sufi thought and his authorship of two prose treatises, Haqq al-Yaqīn and Risāla-yi Shādī.

He is remembered above all for the Gulshan-i Rāz (The Secret Rose Garden), a short mystical poem in rhyming couplets, written in 1311 in answer to questions put by a Sufi scholar of Herat. It treats unity, the soul's journey, the world as reflection and the language of wine and beauty as symbols of the divine. The English text offered here is Florence Lederer's selective 1920 version.