Episode 5: Sa’di Logic of the Birds

Professors Fatemeh Keshavarz and Cyrus Zargar explore the poetry of Sa‘di, the traveling poet of 7th/13th-century Shiraz known for his fluid and natural style, wit, and wisdom. His Bustan and Gulistan are considered masterpieces of Persian composition and were widely-studied from the Balkans to Bengal, influencing later Persian as well as European authors.







Links and Further Reading/Listening:



Thackston, W.M. The Gulistan (Rose Garden) is Sa’di: A Bilingual English and Persian Edition (Bethesda, MD: Ibex Publishers, 2008).



Keshavarz, Fatemeh. Lyrics of Life: Sa’di on Love, Cosmopolitanism and Care of the Self  (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).



Zargar, Cyrus, The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).



Ingenito, Domenico, Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry (Boston: Brill, 2020)



Online Collection of Sa‘di’s Poetry (in Persian): https://ganjoor.net/saadi



Host: Oludamini Ogunnaike



Guests: Fatemeh Keshavarz and Cyrus Zargar



Edited By: Alana Bittner, WJTU