Gulshan I Raz | The Mystic Rose Garden Of Mahmud Shabistari

گلشن راز | Gulshan I Raz | Sa’d Ud Din Mahmud Shabistari

English Translation: The Mystic Rose Garden

Translation by:  E.H. Whinfield

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The Gulshan i Raz was composed in A.H. 717 (A.D. 1317), in answer to fifteen questions on the doctrines of the Sufis, or Muhammadan Mystics, propounded by Amir Syad Hosaini, a celebrated Sufi doctor of Herat. The author’s name was Sa’d ud din Mahimud Shabistari, so called from his birth-place, Shabistar, a village near Tabriz, in the province of Azarbaijan. From a brief notice of his life in the Mujalis ul ‘Ushshak, repeated in substance in the Haft Iklim, the Safina i Khushgu, and the Riaz ush Shu’ara, it would appear that he was born about the middle of the seventh century of the Hejira (A.D. 1250), and that he died at Tabriz, where he had passed the greater part of his life, in A.H. 720. The only particulars of his life recorded in these Tazkiras are, that he was devotedly attached to one of his disciples named Shaikh Ibrahim, and that in addition to the Gulshan i Raz he wrote treatises entitled Hakk ul Yakin and Risala i Shahid. No further information as to the circumstances of his life and times is to be found in the poem itself or in the commentary, but we know from the Habib us Siyar and other chronicles that his birth was about contemporaneous with the incursion of the heathen Moghuls under Hulaku Khan, the conquest of Persia, Syria and Mesopotamia, and the downfall of the Abbaside Khalifs, or “Vicars of God.”