SHABISTARĪ, AL- (d. AH 720/1320 CE), more fully Saʿd al-Dīn Maḥmūd ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm ibn Yaḥyā al-Shabistarī; celebrated Ṣūfī author and Persian poet. He was born in the second half of the thirteenth century at Shabistar (Cabistar), a village near Tabriz in Azerbaijan, but spent the greater part of his life at Tabriz, then capital of the newly established Mongol (Il-khanid) empire. Little is known about him, except that he was married, probably at Kirman, and devotedly attached to one of his disciples named Shaykh Ibrāhīm.

In both the Islamic world and the West, his fame rests on the Gulshan-i rāz (Rose Garden of Mystery), a versified compendium of Ṣūfī teachings discovered by European travelers about 1700. In 1838, J. F. von Hammer-Purgstall published a Persian text along with a German verse translation. In 1880, E. H...