The Secret Rose Garden & The Secrets of the Self

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The Secret Rose Garden

of Sa'd Ud Din Mahmud Shabistari, Translated by Florence Lederer

Sa'd ud Din Mahmud Shabistari was born in Persia, in Shabistar, near Tabriz, about 1250 CE. His best known work, The Secret Rose Garden was written as a reply to questions by a Sufi doctor of Herat. This set of verses uses the rich Sufi allegorical language to explore the path to God.

The mystic verse of Shabistari, written during a period of fierce conflict between Christianity and Islam in the fourteenth century, must be considered among the greatest poetry of any time or land. Restating ibn 'Arabi's ideas in poetic form and treating such themes as the Self and the One, the Spiritual Journey, Time and This Dream-World, and the ecstasy of Divine Inebriation, Shabistari's work is a perennial witness to the capabilities and destiny of humanity. While Shabistari was deeply rooted in the Sufi mystical tradition, there are no cultural gaps which need to be bridged, for he was keenly aware of that one unique truth which all religions strive to approximate. Thus he writes: "'I' and 'you' are but the lattices, / In the niches of a lamp, / Through which the One Light shines. / 'I' and 'you' are the veil / Between heaven and earth; / Lift this veil and you will see / No longer the bonds of sects and creeds. / When 'I' and 'you' do not exist, / What is mosque, what is synagogue? / What is the Temple of Fire."
This work will be of interest to all students of Sufism. It contains a concise and very informative introduction, by the translator, to the symbolism of Sufi poetry, and is re-typeset from the first edition, published in 1920 in the Wisdom of the East series. It is estimated to have sold over 15,000 copies in English translation.

The Secrets of the Self

by Muhammad Iqbal, tr. by Reynold A. Nicholson

Muhammad Iqbal was a prominent Islamic writer and politician. Born in the Raj, Cambridge educated, Iqbal is both the the intellectual founder of Pakistan, and its national poet. This poem was composed in Persian, using traditional Persian styles and tropes, and published in Lahore in 1915. The translator was the English orientalist Reynold A. Nicholson. Nicholson later went on to produce the first full critical translation of Rumi's Masnavi into English.

The Secrets of the Self was the first philosophical poetry book of Allama Iqbal, the great poet-philosopher of British India and the founder of the idea of Pakistan. This book deals mainly with the individual, while his second book Rumuz-i-Bekhudi discusses the interaction between individual and society.