Shāhzada va Ṣūfi

Ancient Sanskrit stories of the life of Prince Siddhārtha described how he abandoned his life as a prince to eventually become Gautama Buddha. As the stories circulated over the course of centuries and were rendered in many different languages, the figure of a wise man who guided the prince’s spiritual development became a prominent element. The basic framework of the stories was constant—a prince, with the guidance of a wise man, chooses a life of enlightenment and piety over worldly wealth and power—but the various authors added and disregarded material, drawing from their own intellectual, religious, and literary traditions.
Shāhzada va Ṣūfī (The Prince and the Sufi), a Judeo-Persian literary work of practical wisdom and ethics in this genre, was composed by Elisha ben Samuel, pen-named Rāghib, in 1684. Its immediate source was Abraham ibn Ḥasday’s thirteenth-century Hebrew rendering, Ben ha-Melekh veha-Nazir (Heb. The Prince and the Ascetic). Rāghib’s composition consists of a four-part introduction, thirty-four chapters, and a conclusion. The first fourteen chapters are in masnavī (rhymed couplet) form. The balance of the text is a combination of verse, rhymed prose, and isolated couplets.
The work’s tenets of wisdom ultimately originated in ancient Near Eastern religious texts, mainly from Iran and Israel, and are largely universal and pietistic. As modified and incorporated into Islam’s system of ethics, they found their way into Persian and Judeo-Persian didactic literature. While the Hebrew rendering is noteworthy for the Neoplatonism of its concluding chapters, the Judeo-Persian adaptation uniquely equates Jewish ethics and piety with Islamic mysticism. The wise ascetic who enlightens the prince in Shāhzada va Ṣūfī and introduces him to the tenets of Judaism is a Ṣūfī who routinely uses Ṣūfī terminology to describe moral conduct and ethical virtues.

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