A Letter With Fifteen Questions
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Welcome. In the year seven hundred and seventeen, a messenger arrived in the city of Tabriz, in Persia, carrying a letter. It had been sent by a scholar from Khorasan, and it contained fifteen questions, written in verse, about the deepest mysteries of the heart.
The people gathered there all turned to look at one man, a quiet scholar named Mahmud Shabistari. Answer them, they said. And so, in a few hours, he answered every question in verse. When he asked for a title, he says a reply came to his heart: it is our Rose Garden. Gulshan-i Raz. The Rose Garden of Mystery.
Shabistari was humble about his poetry. I have never written a poem before, he says. "Mystery cannot be compressed into letters, the Red Sea is not contained in a jug." And he bows to the great poet Attar, saying a hundred worlds of mystery like his own would be only one grain from Attar’s shop.
We will follow his garden through the English translation of Edward Whinfield, published in eighteen eighty.
An honest note before we begin. Shabistari belonged to a school of Sufi thought that many great scholars of Islam strongly rejected. Some of his answers go to places that we will not follow. So in this summary, we will walk only through the parts of the garden that help the heart, and we will say clearly when the poet’s path becomes contested.
