Audio of Seyyed Javad Tabatabai's Lecture on Saadi Commemoration Day

Seyyed Javad Tabatabai: I have come from Tabriz to Shiraz to defend Persian literature / My endeavor is to show why literary scholars have been unable to understand Persian literature / Persian literature must be understood within the horizon of Iranian thought / Spengler compared Germany with Iran and made a fundamental statement: Iran has been abandoned to the care of literary scholars / Iran must be rescued from the hands of literary scholars / From the Mongol period onward, Persian literature undergoes a transformation that is incomprehensible to literary scholars / In the Mongol period, one could not think like Farabi and Ibn Sina, and there was no opportunity for speech / A situation arose in post-Mongol Iran where the form of thinking became different / The efforts of post-Mongol thinkers were directed toward something that would substitute for relations that no longer existed / Khajeh Nasir, in the *Nasirean Ethics*, endeavors to speak of another ethics / Obeid Zakani, in *The Ethics of the Aristocracy*, also ridicules the opinion and practice that the ethics of the Mongol period—which was no ethics—had produced / Hafez had realized this problem: that we do not practice the theoretical ethics we have, and the ethics of the libertine that we practice has no theory / Hafez says: I mingled the soul with reason / France is a country of poets and has inclined toward Saadi, but Germany is the land of philosophers and thinkers and has taken notice of Hafez / Why was Saadi important before the arrival of literary scholars, and why is he squandered after their arrival? / The tension and conflict in the *Golestan* regarding the support of the poor and the rich is because Saadi had realized that the existing theoretical ethics had vanished and nothing had replaced it / Saadi possesses the fluid mentality of the ancient human and, in a way, of the new / Saadi founds his own ethics on this basis / There are ruptures and revolutions in Saadi that are incomprehensible to formal literary scholars / Iran's history and culture have been able to create regions in our thought that I call the new within the old / These regions of the new within the old are very important; the refuge sought by Persian literature in the shadow of Iranian thought is very important / The Arab world lacks these regions, and regions of the new within the old are necessary for a renaissance / The reason for the gathering of poets and philosophers in Iran is because of these regions / We must focus on these regions of the new within the old.

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Download the audio of Seyyed Javad Tabatabai's lecture on Saadi Commemoration Day

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The present file is the audio of the lecture by "Seyyed Javad Tabatabai" on Saadi Commemoration Day, which was held on April 20, 2016, in Shiraz.

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