To reframe a figure as central to a classical canon as Saʿdī is to Persian literature is a bold endeavor. Domenico Ingenito's Beholding Beauty is a magnificent achievement of multiple broad reappraisals that decisively reconfigure “the open landscape of Saʿdi's balanced contemplation of the beauty of the world” (p. 3). For centuries, Saʿdī's works have been associated with a style of smooth, limpid minimalism (sahl-i mumtanaʿ) conveying an elegant moral vision (or, less charitably, a wisdom that has been made to feel prim, safe, even arid). Although love is unmistakably a central theme throughout his corpus, Saʿdī himself does not supply crisp definitions of lust or love or passion; nor does he offer systematic taxonomies or theories of the erotic (p. 48). Reconstructing Saʿdī's “aesthetics of desire,” Ingenito convincingly shows how Saʿdī effects a complex coalescence of “homoeroticism, lyricism, and political insight” (p. 92). One of the book's main claims is that it is philologically unsound to diminish or prudishly overlook the sensuality and homoeroticism at the core of Saʿdī's ethical teaching. When Saʿdī lingers on physical beauty as an embodiment of a patron's princely qualities, this “sexualized representation of political power” creates a vital “synergy between the erotic and encomiastic” (p. 98). Ingenito untangles such synergies with philological rigor, scrupulous contextualization, and critical care, offering a fresh, urgent, and tremendously exciting reassessment of the shaykh of Shiraz.

Part 1 reveals the porousness between modalities and genres across Saʿdī's corpus, attuning readers to shimmering interplays between reality and fiction, verse and prose, literary convention and factual representation—attending in particular to fluidities of gender and desire. By rehabilitating Saʿdī's pornographic poems (hitherto almost entirely neglected by scholarship) and reading Saʿdī's obscene poems as counter-texts to the amatory lyric, Ingenito shows how seemingly opposed entities—courtly and pornographic lyric poetry; politics and lust; spiritual devotion and carnal passion—together constitute a flexible, interdependent system that accommodates diverse approaches to desire. For instance, conventionally, the beloved in medieval poetry is a beautiful boy who captures the gaze of an older man; but Saʿdī's poems also describe encounters with a beloved who is conspicuously not younger (“a strong man who has long since crossed the threshold of manhood”; p. 199). Saʿdī's willingness to write against the grain of convention is especially evident in his obscene poems. Pornographic poetry in Saʿdī's era trades primarily in bawdy humor and lewd description; in contrast, Ingenito reveals how Saʿdī's pornographic poems can harbor indeterminate intimacies, as in the following line from an obscene poem, translated by Ingenito with lapidary restraint: “How could I be fulfilled by just looking at you? Other actions I have in mind, but none of them can I say to you” (pp. 163–72). Such amatory lyric delicacy here, in the middle of an obscene poem, is startling—and perhaps more shocking in its incongruity than any flagrant violation of decorum. Simultaneous exposure to such different sides of the lyric spectrum equips readers with habits of hermeneutic openness, allowing them to experience the spiritual and the erotic as events that cannot be decoupled. One of the most important contributions here is Ingenito's injunction to mind the gap between contemporary assumptions about desire, lust, and sexuality, and premodern varieties of human experience that are inadequately picked out by modern terms. Ingenito makes the case that if we “grant these texts their partial alterity with respect to us and our categories,” it is possible to discover that Saʿdī's concepts of love and lust are “much more unsettling, disturbing, and confusing than we would have ever imagined. But also more alluring, modern, cosmopolitan” (p. 53).

Part 2 situates Saʿdī's sacred eroticism within the wider medieval intellectual world. These chapters chart affinities (not necessarily direct or explicit causal links) between Saʿdī's thought, al-Ghazālī's aesthetics and epistemology, and Ibn Sīnā's rationalism and psychology. Situating Saʿdī's aesthetics of desire within these systems without invoking narrow principles of influence allows Ingenito to move beyond deflationary scholarly tendencies that align Saʿdī with only one Sufi order or compress his thought to fit it within a single doctrine or system. Ingenito argues that, for Saʿdī, sensual experience and pious devotion are not mutually exclusive: they coexist in a state of provocative, necessary, and productive collusion. Just as al-Ghazālī allows for many paths to the divine (rational contemplation, but also visionary experience), Saʿdī too explores multiple ways of accessing higher truth—without resolving tensions that arise between them. What accounts for Saʿdī's seemingly fractured allegiance to incompatible forms of desire? As Ingenito puts it, “the body of the beloved turns into a space of semiotic conflict, in which multiple desires and possibilities converge—especially with respect to the fictional world of the text and its points of contact with external reality” (p. 242). By lingering on the beloved's body as a space of plural hermeneutic possibility, Saʿdī demonstrates for readers how they too can contextualize desire in multiple ways. The affinities educed by Ingenito between Saʿdī, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn Sīnā clarify the contours and stakes of beholding beauty in the physical world. These thinkers all admit multiple pathways to the divine, while allowing for inevitable, messy collisions between embodiment, lust, and spiritual yearning. Ingenito builds a convincing case that Saʿdī's approach comes sharply into focus when situated within this larger ecosystem of philosophical ideas.

In part 3, Ingenito offers a rich theorization of the lyric genre. Saʿdī's ghazals are analyzed as performance spaces, arenas of experience in which readers are guided through varieties of desire. Ingenito presents a highly exportable theory of the lyric, where the ghazal is “a form of psychological training” (p. 508): audiences visualize “the spiritual understanding of beauty” and learn to transform “spiritual bewilderment into aesthetic ecstasy” (p. 507). Central to this theory of the lyric is the idea that Saʿdī's poems serve as textual analogues or transcripts of the Sufi practice of musical audition (samāʿ). Ingenito translates samāʿ as “lyrical ritual,” which partially untethers this concept from familiar devotional parameters; this allows him to analyze Saʿdī's lyric poems as spaces where diverse audiences experience a “fluid system of values” and a “broad spectrum of ethical attitudes toward the practice of erotic poetry” (p. 454). Saʿdī's lyric appropriation of samāʿ allows readers to “bridge the gap” between the pious and the mundane, “regardless of the overarching religious agenda that might contextualize a given [samāʿ] session” (p. 470). Ingenito also argues that Saʿdī's “ostentatious defense of shāhid-bāzī” (p. 490)—the practice of beholding beautiful young men for spiritual ends—is the culmination of a reconstructible trajectory of creative development. By carefully placing gleanings from Saʿdī's biography alongside relationships with specific courts and patrons, Ingenito traces Saʿdī's evolution into an increasingly “unapologetic” advocate for the enjoyment of “human beauty” (p. 458). A brief epilogue discusses Saʿdī's broad humanistic appeal. Saʿdī's commitment is to guiding readers through a rich gamut of experiences (“political, erotic, courtly, metaphysical, ludic, etc.”; p. 519), and Ingenito argues that the enduring value of Saʿdī's ethical teaching rests on this fusion of the sacred, the aesthetic, and the erotic.

Unstable balances between truth and fiction, nuanced moral realism, the psychological complexity of the lyric subject: these hallmarks of Saʿdian thought as reconstructed by Ingenito will be of great interest to scholars beyond Persian studies. In Beholding Beauty, Saʿdī emerges as a refreshingly complex figure whose works constitute an open framework for experimentation, akin to what Gordon Teskey, borrowing from Adorno, calls open thinking—a style of improvisational, exploratory inquiry undertaken through imaginative literature, where the shape of thought is dynamic and open-ended.Footnote ¹ Ingenito shows that Saʿdī's works are not vehicles for predigested ideas or precisely defined meanings; indeed, Saʿdī has been a timeless source of wisdom precisely because of his open style of thinking. Like Saʿdī, Ingenito does not settle for easy or stable definitions. One of the book's strengths is its insistence on embracing textual, conceptual, and aesthetic ambivalences; Ingenito describes his method as “navigat[ing] through a cluster of islands without the aid of maps—an experience of the literary territory that is rhizomatic rather than cartographical” (p. 52). Running to just over five hundred pages, Ingenito's exploration of Saʿdī's terrain is by no means a quick day trip; but the frequent recurrence of interlinked conceptual signposts and the organizational clarity of the book's three parts ensures that the voyage does not flag. Ingenito writes with an ardor that kindles, spreading from page to reader; in a characteristically arresting analogy, Ingenito compares Saʿdī's poems to Rothko paintings: both are “made of delicate simplicity, balanced contrasts of mood, and gradual variations across the spectrum of sensory experience” (p. 33). Beholding Beauty is an exciting model of scholarship that dares to open itself to ambiguities, multiple possibilities, and nonlinear explorations of “the anthropological complexity of the human theater” (p. 136). Ingenito's reconstruction of Saʿdī's sacred homoeroticism, his exploration of vital affinities between literature and philosophy and theorization of lyric performativity—these interventions break ample new ground within Saʿdī scholarship and Persian studies, and will be generative for Islamic studies scholars, medievalists, and literary scholars and comparatists far and wide.