Bani Adam (), meaning "Sons of Adam" or "Human Beings", is a 13th-century Persian poem by Iranian poet Saadi Shirazi from his Gulistan. The poem calls humans limbs of one body, all created equal, and when one limb is hurt, the whole body shall be in unease. It therefore concludes that one not touched by the pain of others cannot be called a human.
A translation of the first line of the poem was quoted by former U. S. President Barack Obama in a videotaped message to Iranians to mark Nowruz, the Persian New Year, on 20 March 2009. The poem is also inscribed on a large hand-made carpet installed in 2005 on the wall of a meeting room in the United Nations building in New York. A famous Iranian carpet trader had gifted the precious carpet, with Saadi’s poem sewn on it with golden thread, with the condition that it should be displayed somewhere appropriate.
In 2019, British rock band Coldplay featured the poem as spoken text in their song of the same name (listed as ), as part of their 8th studio album, Everyday Life.
Text The poem comes from Saadi's book the Gulistan or Golestan (chapter 1, story 10), completed in AD 1258.
A close translation of the above is as follows:
"Human Beings are members of a whole In creation of one essence and soul If one member is inflicted with pain Other members uneasy will remain If you have no sympathy for human pain The name of human you can not pertain"
Or:
"Human beings are body parts of each other, In creation they are indeed of one treasure. If a body part is afflicted with pain, Other body parts uneasy will remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain, The name of human you shall not retain."
Another poetic version by Dick Davis:
Man’s sons are parts of one reality Since all have sprung from one identity; If one part of a body’s hurt, the rest Cannot remain unmoved and undistressed; If you’re not touched by others’ pain, the name Of “man” is one you cannot rightly claim.
Another version by Kalal Derhami reads:
"Children of Adam are all members of each other In creation made of one earth, one mother In time may a member find himself in pain Other members stand besides him and remain You who won't feel for others in despair and in pain Shall not be worthy as a human and in name"
Context of the poem
The poem comes in the Gulistan at the end of story ten of the first chapter "On the Conduct of Kings". In this story Saʿdi claims to have been praying at the tomb of John the Baptist in the Great Mosque in Damascus, when he gave advice to an unnamed king who requested Saʿdi to add his prayers to his own as he was afraid of a powerful enemy. Saʾdi's advice to the king was that if he wished to live a life free of fear of retribution he should rule his people with justice. He reinforces his advice with two short poems, the second of which is Bani Adam.
There seems no reason to doubt that Saʿdi may have visited Damascus in his travels, although this particular incident, like many of Saʾdi's stories, may of course be fictional.Paul Losensky: Sa'di (Encyclopaedia Iranica). "Although Saʿdi’s own writings, especially the Bustān and Gulistān, contain many purportedly autobiographical reminiscences, a good number of these are historically implausible and are probably fictionalized or cast in the first-person for rhetorical effect."
The story is quoted below in the version completed in 1888 and published in 1928 under the name of Richard Francis Burton, but probably in fact by the Hungarian linguist Edward Rehatsek:J. D. Yohannan (1950). "Did Sir Richard Burton Translate Sadi's Gulistan?". The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, No. 3/4 (Oct., 1950), pp. 185-188.
Story 10
I was constantly engaged in prayer, at the head of the prophet Yahia's tomb in the cathedral mosque of Damascus, when one of the kings, notorious for his injustice, happened to arrive on a pilgrimage to it, who offered his supplications and asked for compliance with his needs.
The dervish and the plutocrat are slaves on the floor of this threshold And those who are the wealthiest are the most needy.
Then he said to me: 'Dervishes being zealous and veracious in their dealings, unite thy mind to mine, for I am apprehensive of a powerful enemy.' I replied: 'Have mercy upon thy feeble subjects that thou mayest not be injured by a strong foe.'
With a powerful arm and the strength of the wrist To break the five fingers of a poor man is sin. Let him be afraid who spares not the fallen Because if he falls no one will take hold of his hand. Whoever sows bad seed and expects good fruit Has cudgelled his brains for nought and begotten vain imaginations. Extract the cotton from thy ears and administer justice to thy people And if thou failest to do so, there is a day of retribution. – The sons of Adam are limbs of each other Having been created of one essence. When the calamity of time afflicts one limb The other limbs cannot remain at rest. If thou hast no sympathy for the troubles of others Thou art unworthy to be called by the name of a man.
Variant readings The first line of the poem is quoted in two different versions, one with "one another" and the other with "one body". Both readings have their supporters.
In favour of The variant of the poem containing the word "one another" is the form more usually quoted in Iran. It is the version found in the standard edition of the Gulistan edited by Mohammad Ali Foroughi, on the Internet on the Persian Literature website,Gulistan 1.10 (Ganjoor website) . and woven on the Persian carpet presented to the United Nations in New York in 2005.United Nations press release. In 2010 the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran issued a containing the first couplet of the poem, also with the version. In a statement issued at the time in response to a controversy in the press about the choice of version, the bank said that they had chosen this version after consultation with experts at the Academy of Persian Language and Literature.Mehr News article, 1 Tir 1389 (22 June 2010) (in Persian).IBNA News Agency article, 31 Ordibehesht 1397 (21 May 2018) (in Persian).
Among statements issued by experts at the time of the issue of the banknote, Professor Kavoos Hasanli of the University of Shiraz, the author of a book on Saadi, was quoted as saying that is closer to the construction and grammar of Persian in Saadi's time and therefore more trustworthy. Later, however, in another statement he revised his view to say that although is more grammatical and closer to the language of Saadi, he believed that since this version is not found in the early manuscripts, it is not the original one.Central Bank press release, 8 Tir 1389 (29 June 2010) (in Persian).
The variant is also favoured by Mohammad Jafar Yahaghi of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, and was also supported by the late Professors Mojtaba Minovi and Gholamhossein Yousefi.
The version with is said to be found in all the early manuscripts, dating to within 60 years of the composition of the Gulistan. The scholar wrote: "Twenty years ago when I was assisting the late Mohammad Ali Foroughi in preparing the 2nd edition of his collected works of Saadi, we had available some very old and reliable manuscripts, dating from 717 (1317-8 AD) and 724 (1324 AD) and later. In all these copies the poem appeared in the form banī ādam a'zāye yekdīgar-and."Mehr News article, 6 Tir 1389 (27 June 2010) (in Persian).
In favour of However, despite the lack of manuscript support, other scholars have argued for the correctness of the variant . Among these was Saeed Nafisi, himself the author of an edition of the Gulistan (1962), who pointed out that in the ta'liq style of handwriting used in Saadi's time, the expressions and would have looked almost identical.Rasoul Ghorbani, Rahpardakht, 1 Khordad 1397 (22 May 2018) (in Persian, with illustration).article by Seyyed Abdolreza Mousavi Tabari (in Persian). Another scholar who supported the reading yek peykar was the famous blind teacher , on the grounds that "members of one body" was not only more logical, but also closer to the hadith cited above, on which the poem is based.article by Ali Saki, Golvani News Agency, 11.3.1397 (1 June 2018) (in Persian).
It may be noted that although the carpet in the United Nations has the version woven into it, the English translation by Edward Eastwick on the plaque alongside it quoted in a speech by Ban Ki-moon (see below) "All human beings are members of one frame" translates the other version with yek peykar.
The word has a wide range of meanings: "image", "figure", "effigy", "likeness", "statue", "icon", "body".Google translate.Wiktionary: پیکر. Before Saadi's time it was most famously used by Nizami Ganjavi in his poem Haft Peykar ("The Seven Portraits")François de Blois: Haft Peykar (Encyclopaedia Iranica). of 1197, the story of King Bahram, who finds portraits of seven princesses in a locked room. In other contexts, however, such as ghazal 595.6, where Saadi writes of his "feeble body" (), the translation "body" is appropriate.Saadi, Ghazal 595 (Ganjoor website).
Metre
The prose stories of the Gulistan are illustrated with short poems in a large variety of different metres. Three different metres are used in Story 10. The first couplet is in the 13-syllable ruba'i metre (3.3.13 and 5.1.13 in Elwell-Sutton's classificationElwell-Sutton, L.P. (1986). Arūz (Encyclopaedia Iranica).); the second poem, of four couplets, is in the 15-syllable metre known as (4.1.15), often used for lyric poetry.
The third poem, Bani Adam, is in the well-known 11-syllable (mutaqārib) metre (1.1.11), which is also used for Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and for Saadi's long poem the Bustan. The metre is usually used as here in the form of rhyming couplets.
The pattern of the metre is as follows (where "u" is a short syllable, and "–" a long one), reading from left to right: u – – | u – – | u – – | u –
Monotony is avoided by variation in the position of the word accents, and by the occasional use of "overlong" syllables such as rūz and ozv- in the third and fourth lines, which are prolonged and occupy the time of a long plus a short syllable:Elwell-Sutton, L.P. (1976). The Persian Metres. Cambridge University Press., p. 214.
Thus these two lines have only 10 syllables instead of the usual 11.
United Nations connection
The first Iranian representative to the League of Nations (the predecessor of the United Nations) from 1928 to 1930 was Mohammad Ali Foroughi, the editor of Saadi's works.Forūgī, Mohammad Ali (Encyclopedia Iranica). In a speech made in Paris in 1929, Foroughi described how at a banquet of the League of Nations in Geneva in September 1928, an Albanian representative (who had apparently learnt Persian when Albania was still part of the Ottoman Empire) had made the suggestion that Saadi's poem would make a good motto for the organisation.Seyyed Abdolreza Mousavi Tabari , quoting the account of the 1929 conference published in the book Jāme'e-ye Melal (Société des Nations) (1930), pp. 10-11 (in Persian).
It seems that the suggestion was not taken up, but for many years it was rumoured in Iran that Saadi's poem had been inscribed over the entrance to the United Nations headquarters, either in New York or in Geneva. Later, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Permanent Representative of Iran to the United Nations from 2002 to 2007, described how he searched both locations in vain, and could find no trace of any such inscription.