His name was "Muslehuddin", and "Shaikh Sa'di" was his title. He was born in the year 1184 A.D., in the city of Shiraz, Iran, He belonged to a respectable, cultured family who greatly valued education with the result that Shaikh Sa'di received the best training possible in literature and religious knowledge.
His father Abdullah was a descendent of Hazrat Ali, and was nobleman in the service of the court of Ata Beg.

He was very devoted to religion and was given to the contemplation of religious subjects early in life. He tells a story about himself, of how as a child, he used to pray long hours at night to ask forgiveness from God for the sins of erring humanity. One day his father noticed his long, earnest nightly preoccupation’s in prayer and asked him what he was doing. "is it not better that you think of your own sins first!" asked his father.

Since that lesson, Shaikh Sa'di never ceased examining his life in all its facets and contemplating lives of human beings.

He devoted, according to himself, the first forty years of his life to frivolous activities, after which he seriously tackled the task of digesting the education he had received and then to observe life's problems.

Sa’di’s life consisted of three periods. Until 1226 A.D., he was busy with his studies. From 1226 to 1256 A.D., he spent his life as a traveler in different countries of the world. And the last part from 1256 -1291 A.D, he spent in writing, contemplating and admonishing people as a Sufi.

In those days, Shiraz was a great center of learning and Sa’di was admitted into a big madrasa there where he received his primary education. Then he left for higher education in the famous Nizamiyya Madrasa of Baghdad. He studied philosophy and science under the able guidance of Farah Ibn al-Jawahir. Then he studied logic, history, geography, philosophy, tafsir, hadith, fiqh, etc. He was very religious from his boyhood and he was a strict follower of the Shari’a. While in Bahdad he received extensive instruction in tasawwuf (sufism) from several Sufis that he came in contact with and became a follower of the famous Sufi Shaykh Shahabuddin Suhrawardi (died 1234) whose influence and association had a great impact oh him. Sa’di was a master of several languages but he wrote only in his mother tongue, Persian, and occasionally in Arabic.

After the end of his studies in Baghdad he came back to Shiraz, but found that his chief patron Sultan Ata Beg had been killed by the Khwarizmi Sultan, Ghiyathu’d-din Isfahani. Following this political upset the general people were subjected to looting and exploitation by the Mongols and Turks, and their miseries knew no bounds. Seeing their misery, he found the situation unbearable and he left the country and decided to go on travelling from country to country.

From 1226 - 1256 A.D., for a period of thirty years, he traveled from Shiraz to Khurasan, to Tatar, to Balkh, to Kashghar, Ghazna, Punjab, Somnath, Gujarat, Yemen, Hijaz, Abyssinia, Palestine, Syria, Damascus, Ba’albek, North Africa, Asia Minor, etc. In each of these places he stayed for months or years, studied the people and gained many and varied experiences. While in Somnath, he saw the idol worship of the Hindus and recorded his astonishing experiences in the Bustan in beautiful couplets. From Somnath he went to Gujarat, and then to Punjab and then to Delhi. From Delhi he went to the Yemen where he lost his son by his first wife. He was very upset at this loss.

From the Yemen he went to Abyssinia where he participated the Crucade. Then he went to Makka and performed the Hajj. In all, he performed Hajj fourteen times on foot. From Makka to went to Damascus and then Ba’lbek. In Damascus and Ba’lbek he started giving sermons on religion and people gave him the title of Shaikh. His lectures and sermons were received with great appreciation. Then he left for Jerusalem and for some time he hid himself in a lonely place far from other people. At this time, he fell into the hands of French soldiers who arrested him and sent him to Tripoli to work as an ordinary prisoner digging ditches. He experienced how painful the life of a prisoner was and was forced to spend some time in this inhuman life in captivity.

At last a friend of his from Aleppo got him released on payment of a large ransom and also gave him his daughter in marriage. However this wife was very hot-tempered and ill-spoken. He could not bear her and had to leave Aleppo and Asia Minor and finally ending his journeying in his birthplace, Shiraz, in the year 1256 A.D.

In Shiraz his old patron, Sultan Ata Beg, had been succeeded by his son Sultan Abu Bakkar and his other friends he decided to stay on permanently in Shiraz and to devote his time to the meditation on Allah and to his writings. He was by then an old man but very rich and mature with a wealth of experience gained by thirty years of travel over a great part of the world. The books he now produced were so rich a fountain that people have been drinking ever since from them with no sign of satiety. The "Bustan" and the "Gulistan" have maintained their popularity right up until the present day.

At the time he was engaged in writing his Bustan and Gulistan, he was already past eighty and his mind was at its purest. He was above any small things or demands of this world. He was completely devoted to his Lord.

He wrote three verses, being fully drowned in love of the Holy Prophet:

Balaghul ula bi-kamalihi

Kashafad-duja bi-jamalihi

Hasanath jami’u khisalihi

But he wasn't able to complete the couplets, as only one verse was remianing. In the night the Holy Prophet came to his dream. He said to him that he has written a devoted poetry on him, but only one verse is remaining. The Holy Prophet asked him to recite whatever he has written. So he recited all three verses. Then the Holy Prophet told him to add this verse:

Sallu ‘alayhi wa alihi

When he woke up, he was very much pleased, and completed the couplets:

Balaghul ula bi-kamalihi

Kashafad-duja bi-jamalihi

Hasanath jami’u khisalihi

Sallu ‘alayhi wa alihi

He was a man of the people with strong sympathies for the common man. He recorded stories about people and those who ruled over them in beautiful prose and verse, often drawing a moral lesson from each one of them. Most of his stories are told light-heartedly in the conversational style of a born story-teller, illustrated expertly with delightful flights in poetry.

Shaykh Sa’di died at the ripe age of 110 in the year 1291 A.D., in Shiraz and was buried there, where later the poet Hafiz was also buried. His grave bears no extraordinary monument except an epitaph of a few couplets from his Bustan, the first couplets of which are: