Saadi Shirazi’s Gulistan (1258 CE) and the Uzbek folk-tale tradition belong to different linguistic, temporal and geographic spheres, yet they share the broad purpose of transmitting ethical wisdom through narrative. This article undertakes a comparative, genre-oriented examination of Gulistan’s didactic anecdotes and representative Uzbek folk tales recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on narratological theory, Persian and Turkic poetics, and Soviet-era folkloristics, the study employs a close reading of one hundred twenty-four Persian prose episodes and one hundred sixty-three Uzbek oral texts filtered through archival transcriptions. Qualitative analysis is complemented by a quantitative mapping of plot functions, actant structures and formulaic motifs. The findings show that Gulistan fuses adab prose conventions with sermonising verse to create a hybrid “mirror for princes” genre, whereas Uzbek tales retain epic and trickster subgenres with a cyclical plot architecture governed by formulaic openings and closings. Both corpora employ concise moral coda, but they differ in the distribution of humour, the role of supernatural intervention and the calibration of social hierarchy. The comparative perspective illuminates the historical diffusion of Persianate literary values in Central Asia while underscoring the resilience of indigenous Uzbek narrative patterns.

Saadi Shirazi, Gulistan, Uzbek folklore, genre analysis

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