Saadi

Saadi was born about 1210 at Shiraz in southern Persia. He lost his father as a child and later studied at the famous Nizamiyya college in Baghdad. After the Mongol invasion he set out on some thirty years of wandering that took him through Iraq, Syria, Arabia, North Africa and Asia Minor, and reportedly to India and Central Asia; he was once taken prisoner by the Crusaders and set to dig trenches at Tripoli. Returning home near the age of fifty, he wrote his two masterpieces, The Orchard and The Rose Garden, and spent a peaceful old age in Shiraz. His lines beginning 'The children of Adam are limbs of one body' are inscribed today in the hall of the United Nations.