Tuti Nama: The Golistan of Nakhshabi

Ziyauddin Nakhshabi (d.1350 at Badaun,UP) was a poet, writer and Sufi par excellence and was a real connoisseur of literature. He was born in Nakhshab now located in Uzbekistan. Due Mongol havoc in Central Asia he migrated to India and stayed at Badaun which was a centre of Islamic culture and knowledge at that time.
He was an established and reputed writer; having written excellent texts on Sufism and endowed with a powerful Persian language to express himself both in poetry and prose. He was a man who knew that Saadi of Shiraz (Iran) had written the Golistan in which the Shirazi had claimed that he was writing the book which would be used by the orators to hone their skill in oration and help the writers to develop their power of writing. He was a great admirer of Saadi. In one of his couplets in the Tuti Nama, Nakhshabi says:
Every city and every place is famous for a product
Zia from Nakhshab, Candy from Egypt and Saadi from Shiraz
Being a great devotee of Saadi, he took upon himself the task of writing the Tuti Nama in a manner or form that it would be appreciated by the readers as well as by the audience. What Saadi is to Persian literature, Nakhshabi is to Indo-Persian literature. He has made this fine point very clear in the introduction to the Tuti Nama and receives this instruction from his mentor to write a book which shall be of immense use for the reader as well as for the audience.