Anyone familiar with the Holy Quran...

Anyone familiar with the Holy Quran, the sayings of the Holy Prophet ('s), Amir al-Mu'minin 'Ali ('a), the other Imams ('a), and Muslim saints of the first rank, can observe a characteristic spirit pervading all Persian literature containing spiritual counsel, which represents the spirit of Islam embodied in the Persian language and embellished with its charm and sweetness.

If an expert or a group of experts in Arabic and Persian literature acquainted with the works in all other languages that reflect the spirit of Islam, were to collect the masterpieces in the field of spiritual counsel, the extraordinary richness and maturity of the Islamic culture in lhis field will be revealed. It is strange that so far as the works on spiritual counsel are concerned the Persian genius has mostly expressed itself in poetry; there is no such work of eminence in prose.

All that exists of it in prose is in the form of short sayings, like the prose writings of the Gulistan-a part of which consists of spiritual counsels and is in itself a masterpiece-or the sayings ascribed to Khwajah 'Abd Allah al-'Ansari.

Of course, my own knowledge is inadequate, but as far as I know there does not exist in Persian prose any remarkable work, except for short sayings-not even a passage which is long enough to be counted as a short discourse, especially a discourse which was originally delivered extempore and later collected and recorded in writing.

There are discourses which have been related from Rumi or Sa'di, meant as oral moral advice to their followers; they also by no means possess the brilliance and charm of the poetic works of those masters, and definitely are not worth considering for a comparison with the discourses of the Nahj al-balaghah .

The same can be said about the writings which have reached us in the form of a treatise or letter, such as the Nasihat al-muluk by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, the Taziyaneh-ye suluk by Ahmad al-Ghazali, the latter being an elaborate epistle addressed to his follower and pupil 'Ayn al-Qudat al-Hamadan. Previous…