Sanai

Abul-Majd Majdud ibn Adam Sanai, known as Hakim Sanai, was a Persian poet and mystic working in the Sufi tradition. He lived in Ghazni, in present-day Afghanistan, the capital of the Ghaznavid empire, in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. He is one of the first major poets to give literary shape to Sufi mysticism, and his work marks a turning point in Persian literature.

Little is known for certain about his early life. He served at the Ghaznavid court, writing panegyrics for his patrons, but in the early years of the twelfth century he left the court and travelled through Khorasan, meeting theologians and Sufi masters. Some accounts say that an encounter with the Sufi Lai Khur, possibly of the malamati current, led him toward a more austere spiritual life. After pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina he returned to Ghazni, where he lived in retirement even though Sultan Bahram Shah courted him. In his lifetime he was accused of heterodoxy, but a fatwa issued from the caliph's court in Baghdad defended his orthodoxy. The date of his death is uncertain, with 1131, 1150 and 1180 all proposed.

His principal work, the Hadiqat al-Haqiqa, known in English as The Walled Garden of Truth, is a didactic masnavi of about ten thousand couplets in ten books. For Sanai, passion, greed and emotional excitement keep human beings from the knowledge of God, the only true reality. Love and social conscience were, in his view, the foundation of religion, while faith reduced to custom and ritual seemed empty. The seeker must renounce the self and the world and keep the remembrance of God alive.

Sanai was the first to use the qasida, the ghazal and the masnavi to express Sufi mysticism and ethics, opening a new language for spiritual poetry. His influence reached Nizami and, above all, Attar and Rumi, who counted him among their great sources. His work is still read as a classic of Persian literature.