Socio-Cultural and Political Impact on Literature of Iran

’Socio-Cultural and political condition of Iran’ in which I tried to mention the thirteenth century, Islam, in its variety of schools and sects, was the central religious and spiritual framework within which virtually everyone lived and died in Islamic countries. The government was not just absolute but also arbitrary, the word of the ruler being law as it had been since the foundation of ancient Persia. Early in the century, Mongol hordes had overrun the country. In the middle of the century, the second wave of Mongol invasion led by Hulagu Khan overthrew both the remnants of Persian Ismailis and the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, the latter in the same year that Saadi wrote his Golestan. It did not take long for the autonomous government of Fars, Sa’di’s homeland, with its capital Shiraz to fall effectively under the rule of the new Mongol Ilkhan empire which was centered in Azerbaijan. As noted in the previous chapter, it was an age in which Sufism became widespread among ordinary people and a definite subject of conviction and disputation within the elite.