The Venture of Islam, Volume 2: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods by Hodgson Marshall G. S

Author:Hodgson, Marshall G. S. [Hodgson, Marshall G. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

The lessons Sa’dî taught and the wisdom he preached made no pretence to originality. Indeed, wisdom is seldom original. What Sa’dî aimed to do was to put the old truths well. He phrased in unforgettable images the truths that people always know and yet spend a lifetime learning. These are truths which are apparently simple and even obvious, and which even youngsters are aware of in some degree, and yet which, with each year of increasing age and further experience, each person seems to know as he had not known them before. Already in the ancient Cuneiform literature—as in most other literatures—writers had tried to put such wisdom in a clever nutshell, in a memorable, definitive form wherein the mind could see its own sagest reflections as in a mirror. The Hebrew Bible contains elegant examples of the genre. This has been called ‘wisdom literature’ and has always been popular even with the most sophisticated. Sa‘dî’s is one of the most cherished attempts at this in the whole Irano-Semitic tradition.

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