The famous poem “Adam’s Tribe” is an excerpt from the poem “Gulistan” composed by the great Persian poet Saadi Shirazi in 1258. Today it adorns the front of the UN headquarters building in New York in gold letters.
“All human beings are members of one frame,
Since all, at first, from the same essence came.
When time afflicts a limb with pain
The other limbs at rest cannot remain.
If thou feel not for other’s misery
A human being is no name for thee.”
We – humanity – are one soul, fully connected, “as one man with one heart.” It is a state where we are completely connected to each other, like cells and organs in the body. And our perception of separation and isolation comes from our selfishness. We come out of the “first essence” which is our common nature, the drive to receive.
In the same way, we can interpret the words, “If one part of the body is wounded, then the whole body trembles. That is, even if one part of our body is afflicted by selfishness – the desire to enjoy only for its own sake – then the whole body becomes sick, just as a cancerous cell does in the human body.
Today we can say of humanity that it is all afflicted with selfishness – and that is actually a good thing. What’s good about him? In that it comes very close to fully recognizing selfishness as an evil quality that negatively affects us all. There is a saying that diagnosing a disease is half of its cure. Accordingly, recognizing that we are afflicted by selfishness, experiencing it as a cancerous tumor that hurts and brings harm into our lives, causes us to seek ways to treat it.
Just as the disease of one part of the body affects the whole body, so the correction we need to make encompasses the whole of humanity. It is not enough to heal only a part of it; today it must be global because we are a globally integrated humanity.
Given the violent tribal nature of the 13th century, with the back and forth ebb and flow of Turkic and Mongol armies, this is a most amazing poem testifying to Persia of the time reaching a height of cutural greatness — a bright light of the medieval Islamic world.
Indeed, far seeing, it is a deep insight that has evolved into a very empirical, existential reality in our times. Even if posted in a rather ironic tribal place, a “polite” politically correct version of the worst of those times, at least it is proclaimed — if by blatant hypocrites — as a theoretical value. [Though perhaps one fine morning, the occupants of that UN building might actually read it as they enter and take it to heart.]
Thank you for bringing this magnficient poem into our view, and expressing the true depth of its meaning. In our times we do most particularly feel it on our flesh (even through the dead outer layer called the “United Nations”). May sooner, not later, the growing pain bring us out of our self-destructive stupor.