Bani Adam

A translation of the first line of the poem was quoted by former U. S. President Barack Obama in a videotaped message to Iranians to mark Nowruz, the Persian New Year, on 20 March 2009.

[1] The poem is also inscribed on a large hand-made carpet installed in 2005[2] on the wall of a meeting room in the United Nations building in New York.

[8] Later, however, in another statement he revised his view to say that although banī ādam a'zāye yek peykar-and is more grammatical and closer to the language of Saadi, he believed that since this version is not found in the early manuscripts, it is not the original one.

[10] The yekdīgar variant is also favoured by Mohammad Jafar Yahaghi of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature,[9] and was also supported by the late Professors Mojtaba Minovi and Gholamhossein Yousefi.

Among these was Saeed Nafisi, himself the author of an edition of the Gulistan (1962), who pointed out that in the ta'liq style of handwriting used in Saadi's time, the expressions yekdīgar and yekpeykar would have looked almost identical.

[12][13] Another scholar who supported the reading yek peykar was the famous blind teacher Dr Mohammad Khazaeli [fa], on the grounds that "members of one body" was not only more logical, but also closer to the hadith cited above, on which the poem is based.

[22] It seems that the suggestion was not taken up, but for many years it was rumoured in Iran that Saadi's poem had been inscribed over the entrance to the United Nations headquarters, either in New York or in Geneva.

Later, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Permanent Representative of Iran to the United Nations from 2002 to 2007, described how he searched both locations in vain, and could find no trace of any such inscription.

[24] The sentiment of Saadi's poem can be seen to conform to the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948,[25] of which the first article reads as follows: Bani Adam was featured as spoken text in Coldplay's song of the same name (listed as Persian: "بنی‌آدم") on their 2019 album Everyday Life.