A Garden Planted in Shiraz
🎧 Listen to this chapter (3 min)
Welcome. About seven hundred and fifty years ago, a man came home to the city of Shiraz in Persia after more than thirty years of travelling. He had walked the roads of Iraq, Syria, Arabia, and beyond. He had studied in Baghdad, met kings and beggars, scholars and thieves.
His name was Saadi. And when he came home, he felt ashamed, he said, to return to his friends with empty hands. Travellers bring gifts of sugar from Egypt, he wrote. But the sugar I bring is not the kind that is eaten. It is the sweetness of words.
So he planted a garden. Not of trees, but of stories. He called it the Bustan, the Orchard. Ten chapters, like ten paths through a garden: justice, generosity, love, humility, trust in God, contentment, good manners, gratitude, repentance, and prayer.
For centuries, children across the Muslim world from Persia to India learned to read with this book. Its lines became proverbs. And its stories are short, sharp, and often surprising.
In this summary, we will walk through that garden together, and pick some of its finest fruit.
