Gulshan i Raz was composed in A.H. 717 (A.D. 1317), in answer to fifteen questions on the doctrines of the Sufis, or Muhamrnadan Mystics, propounded by Amir Syad Hosaini,1 a celebrated Sufi doctor of Herat. The authors name was Sad uddin Mahinud Shabistari, so called from his birth-place, Shabistar,2 a village near Tabriz, in the province of A zarbaijan. From a brief notice of his life in the Mujalis ul Ushshak, repeated in substance in the Haft I klim, the Sajina i Khushgu, and the Riaz ush Slniara, it would appear that he was bom 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 I brahim, 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 chronicles3 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 cf the A bbaside Khalifs, or Vicars of God. And living as he did 1H is life is given in the Nafliat ul Uns of Jami. This name is sometimes written Jabistar or Chabistar. The Persian cliim is usually expressed by the A rabic shin. Ouseley, I bn Haukal, 156. See Malcolm, History of Persia, ii. 252.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
