Sádi (also spelt Sa'di, Saadi, and Sa'adi), the assumed name of the SHEIKH MÜSLIH ADDIN, one of the most celebrated of Persian poets, who was born at Shiraz about the year 1184. Little is known of the circumstances of his life. His father's name was Abdallah, and he was a descendant of Ali, Mohammed's son-in-law; notwithstanding his noble lineage, however, he held but an insignificant position. Sádi was early left fatherless. He received his education in science and theology at Bagdad, and from here he undertook, together with his master, his first pilgrimage to Mecca, a pilgrimage which he subsequently repeated no less than fourteen times. He travelled for a great number of years, and is said to have visited parts of Europe, Barbary, Abyssinia, Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Armenia, Asia Minor, Arabia, Persia, Tartary, Afghanistan, and India. Near Jerusalem he was taken prisoner by the Crusaders, not while fighting against them, but while practising religious austerities in the desert. He was ransomed for ten dinars by a merchant of Aleppo, who recognised him, and gave him his daughter in marriage; this union, however, did not prove happy. He married a second time, but lost his only son. The later part of his life Sádi spent in retirement near his native town, and he died at a very old age in 690 A.H., or 1263 A.D.; according to others, however, he did not die until 1291 or 1292 A.D. In person he is described as having been of rather insignificant appearance, short, slim, and spare. His was a contemplative, pious, and philosophical disposition. The years of his retirement he occupied in composing those numerous works which have made him justly famous through East and West. Although European critics would hardly be inclined to endorse to the full the judgment passed upon him by his countrymen, that he was 'the most eloquent of writers, the wittiest author of either modern or ancient times, and one of the four monarchs of eloquence and style,' yet there is no doubt that this 'nightingale of thousand songs' fully merited the honours showered upon him by princes and nobles, both during his lifetime and after his death. A mausoleum, with a mosque and college attached to it, was erected in his honour at the foot of the hills about 2 miles to the north-east of Shiraz, and the people, who soon wound a halo of legend around his life, flocked thither in pilgrimage.
The catalogue of his works comprises twenty-two different kinds of writings in prose and verse, in Arabic and in Persian, of which ghazels and kassidas ('odes,' 'dirges') form the predominant part. The most celebrated and finished of his works, however, is the Gulistan, or Flower-garden, a kind of moral work in prose and verse, consisting of eight chapters on Kings, Dervishes, Contentment, Taciturnity, Love and Youth, Decrepitude and Old Age, Education, and the Duties of Society, the whole intermixed with a number of stories, maxims, philosophical sentences, puns, and the like. Next to this stands the Bostan, or Tree-garden, a work somewhat similar to the Gulistan, but in verse, and of a more religious nature. Third in rank stands the Pend-Nameh, or Book of Instructions. Elegance and simplicity of style and diction form the chief charm of Sádi's writings. For wit he has been likened to Horace, with whose writings he may not have been unacquainted, since he is said to have known Latin.
The first complete printed edition of his works, called the Salt-cellar of Poets, by Harrington, was published in Calcutta (1791-95), and has been reprinted since by native presses in India. The Gulistan, first edited with a Latin translation by Gentius (Amsterdam, 1651), has been reprinted very frequently, and has been translated into a number of European tongues, into English by Gladwin, Ross, Eastwick, and Platts; and see Robinson's Persian Poetry for English Readers (1883). The Bostan was first published complete in Calcutta in 1828 (Vienna, 1858), and has likewise been translated into other languages; With Sa'di in the Garden, by Sir Edwin Arnold (1889), is a translation of part of the Bostan. Many manuscript copies of Sa'di's works exist. A carefully collated MS. of the Bastân of Shaikh Muslihu-d-Din Sa'adi, prepared by Platts, was photographed and published in London, with annotations by Rogers, in 1891.