Sa'di's Debate with a Critic on Wealth and Poverty

I once saw a man in the guise of dervishes but not of their character, sitting in a gathering, weaving insults, having opened a book of complaints and begun to slander the rich. His words came to this point: that the poor have their hands of power tied, and the rich have the feet of goodwill broken. The generous have no coins in their hands, and those blessed with wealth have no kindness. As one raised on the bounty of great men, this speech struck me hard. I said: My friend, the rich are the income of the poor and the treasure of the reclusive, the goal of pilgrims and the shelter of travelers, bearers of heavy burdens for the ease of others. They stretch their hand to food only after their dependents and servants have eaten, and the leftovers of their generosity reach widows, elders, relatives, and neighbors. The rich have endowments and vows and hospitality, alms and charity, freeing slaves and offerings and sacrifice. How can you reach their good fortune, when all you can manage is these two units of prayer, and even those with a hundred distractions? Whether it is the power to give or the strength to worship, both come easily to the rich, for they own purified wealth, clean clothing, protected honor, and an untroubled heart. The strength for devotion lies in a good meal, and the health of worship in clean garments. Clearly, what strength comes from an empty stomach, what generosity from an empty hand, what pace from a thirsty foot, what good from a hungry hand? At night he sleeps scattered and restless, the one who cannot see where tomorrow's bread will come from. The ant gathers in summer so that it may live at ease through winter. Peace of mind and poverty do not go together, and composure cannot take shape in destitution. One man begins his evening prayer, another sits waiting for a meal. How can these two ever be alike? The man of means is free to devote himself to truth; the one whose living is scattered has a scattered heart. So the worship of these people is more deserving of acceptance, for they are collected and present, not distracted and scattered in mind. Their means of living are arranged, so they turn to the litanies of worship. The Arabs say: 'I seek refuge in God from crushing poverty and from the company of one I do not love,' and a saying goes: 'Poverty is the blackening of the face in both worlds.' He said: Have you not heard that the Prophet, peace be upon him, said, 'Poverty is my pride'? I said: Be silent, for the master's words, peace be upon him, refer to the poverty of those who are champions in the field of God's pleasure and surrendered to the arrow of fate, not to these who wear the cloak of the righteous while selling off their portion of charity. You loud-booming drum, empty inside, what plan will you make for the journey with no provisions? Turn your face of greed away from people, if you are a man; do not twist a thousand-bead rosary through your fingers. The ignorant dervish knows no rest until his poverty ends in unbelief. 'Poverty is close to becoming unbelief,' for only with the presence of wealth can one clothe the naked or work to free a captive. How can people of our kind ever reach their rank? How can the giving upper hand resemble the receiving lower hand? Do you not see that God, mighty and exalted, in the firm revelation, speaks of the bliss of the people of paradise: 'For them there is a known provision,' so that you may know that the one absorbed in just getting by is deprived of the wealth of contentment, and the kingdom of ease lies under the seal of an assured living. To the thirsty in their dreams the whole world appears to their eyes as a spring of water. The moment I finished this speech, the reins of the dervish's patience slipped from the hand of endurance. He drew the sword of his tongue and drove the horse of eloquence into the field of insolence, charging at me, and said: You have exaggerated so much in praising them and spoken such muddled words that one might imagine they are an antidote for all ills, or the key to the treasury of livelihood. A handful of arrogant, deluded, self-admiring, disdainful men, absorbed in wealth and comfort, seduced by rank and riches, who speak only foolishness and look only with contempt. They dismiss scholars as beggars and mock the poor as vagabonds. On the strength of the wealth they hold and the rank they imagine, they seat themselves above everyone and see themselves as better than all, too proud to raise their heads for anyone, ignorant of the saying of the wise: whoever is less than others in devotion and more in wealth is rich in appearance but a pauper in truth. If a talentless man grows proud over a sage because of his wealth, count him a donkey's backside, even if he is a musk-scented ox. I said: Do not permit yourself to slander these people, for they are lords of generosity. He said: You are mistaken, they are slaves of money. What use are they? They are like the clouds of spring that do not rain, like the fountain of the sun that shines on no one. They ride the mount of ability but do not spur it forward. They take not a step for God, and give not a coin without reproach and insult. They gather wealth with hardship, keep it with meanness, and leave it behind with regret, as the wise say: the miser's silver comes up from the ground only when he himself goes into it. One man wins wealth through toil and effort, and another comes and carries it off with no effort or pain. I said to him: You have discovered the stinginess of the wealthy only because of your begging. Otherwise, to anyone who sets greed aside, generous and miser look the same. The touchstone knows what gold is, and the beggar knows who the tightfisted man is. He said: I say this from experience, for they station dependents at the door and post rough, harsh doorkeepers so as not to admit the noble, and to shove back the chests of discerning men, saying 'No one is home,' and they would be telling the truth: Of the man who has no reason, ambition, judgment, or wisdom, well said the doorkeeper: there is no one in the house. I said: Excuse them, for they are worn to the bone by beggars and driven to complaint by their petitions. And it is beyond reason for the sand of the desert to turn to pearls before a beggar's eyes are filled. The eyes of the greedy will never be filled by the wealth of this world, just as a well is never filled by dew. Wherever you see a hardship-worn, bitterness-tasting man, out of greed he throws himself into dangerous deeds, heedless of their consequences, unafraid of God's punishment, unable to tell the lawful from the forbidden. If a clod of earth strikes a dog on the head, it leaps up with joy, thinking, 'This is a bone.' And if two men carry a bier on their shoulders, the base-natured one imagines it is a banquet spread. But the man of wealth is watched by the eye of God's favor and kept safe from the forbidden by the lawful. Suppose I had not stated this argument, still I expect fairness from you: have you ever seen a hand chained to the shoulder in prayer, or a wretch sitting in prison, or the honor of an innocent torn, or a palm severed from the wrist, except because of poverty? Brave men, by force of need, have been caught in break-ins and had their ankles pierced. And it may be that desire tempts one of the poor, and when he has no strength to marry, he falls into sin, for belly and loins are twins, children of one womb: as long as one is content, the other stays quiet. I heard that a dervish was caught with a youth in a foul act. Beyond the shame he felt, there was the danger of stoning. He said: O Muslims, I have not the means to marry nor the patience to abstain, what shall I do? There is no monasticism in Islam. And among the things that grant calm and inner composure to the rich is this: that each night he takes a beauty in his arms, and each day is renewed in youth by her; the bright dawn presses its hand to its heart, ashamed before her radiance, and the swaying cypress sinks its foot in the mud out of embarrassment. She has dipped her fingertips in the blood of the beloved, staining them the red of jujube. It is impossible that with such beauty before him he would circle around sins or set his mind on corruption. A heart that a heavenly houri has seized and plundered, how could it turn its glance toward the idols of the Yaghma? Whoever has before him the dates he craves needs not go pelting the grape clusters for fruit. Most of the poor stain the skirt of their chastity with sin, and the hungry steal bread. When a ravenous dog finds meat, it does not ask whether this is the she-camel of Salih or the donkey of the Antichrist. How many chaste souls, through poverty, have fallen into utter ruin, giving up their precious honor to the wind of ill repute. With hunger, the strength to abstain does not remain; destitution snatches the reins from the hand of piety. Hatim Ta'i, who lived in the desert, would have been driven to despair by the crush of beggars had he lived in a city, and they would have torn the clothes off his back. He said: No, I feel pity for their condition. I said: No, you envy their wealth. We were locked in this argument, both caught up together. Every pawn he pushed forward I moved to block, and every check he called I covered with my queen, until he had gambled away the coin from the purse of his ambition and shot every arrow from the quiver of his proof. Beware, do not throw down your shield before the eloquent man's assault, for he has nothing but that borrowed exaggeration. Practice faith and true knowledge, for the eloquent maker of rhymes carries weapons at the gate while no one guards the fortress within. When at last he had no argument left, I made him abject. He stretched out the hand of aggression and began to talk nonsense, for it is the way of the ignorant that when they fall short of an argument against a rival, they rattle the chain of hostility. Like Azar the idol-carver who, unable to prevail over his son with proof, rose to fight him: 'If you do not stop, I will surely stone you.' He cursed me, I cursed him back. He tore my collar, I seized his chin. He upon me and I upon him, and the people running after us, laughing. A whole world bit the finger of astonishment between its teeth at what we said and heard. In short, we took the dispute of these words before the judge and agreed to accept a just ruling, so that the arbiter of the Muslims might seek out the right course and draw a distinction between the rich and the poor. When the judge saw our trickery and heard our arguments, he sank his head into the collar of reflection, and after much thought raised it and said: You who praised the rich and thought it lawful to wrong the poor, know that wherever there is a rose there is a thorn, with wine comes a hangover, over a treasure lies a snake, and where there is a royal pearl, there is a man-eating crocodile. The sweetness of worldly life has the sting of death behind it, and the bliss of paradise has a wall of hardships before it. How can an enemy's cruelty harm you, if the seeker does not kill the friend? Treasure and snake, rose and thorn, sorrow and joy, all come together. Do you not see in the garden the sweet-scented willow and the dry stick side by side? Just so, among the ranks of the rich there are the grateful and the ungrateful, and in the circle of the poor there are the patient and the fretful. If every hailstone became a pearl, the market would fill with them like cheap shells. Those close to God, mighty and exalted, are the rich with the character of dervishes, and the dervishes with the ambition of the rich. The greatest of the rich is the one who feels the sorrow of the poor, and the best of the poor is the one who wants little from the rich. 'Whoever trusts in God, He is enough for him.' Then he turned the face of rebuke from me toward the dervish and said: You who claimed the rich are all absorbed in wealth, heedless, and drunk on amusements, yes, there is a group with the traits you described: low in ambition, ungrateful for blessings, who take and hoard and neither eat nor give, and even if the rain did not fall or a flood swept away the world, trusting in their own means they would not ask about the misery of the poor, nor fear God, mighty and majestic, and they say: If another perishes from want, I have plenty; what does a duck care about the flood? And the women riding their camels in litters do not turn to look at the one drowning in the sand dunes. The base ones, once they have carried out their own blanket, say: what sorrow is it if the whole world died? There is a group of this sort you have heard of, and there is another that lays out the table of bounty and opens the hand of generosity, seeking a good name and true knowledge, possessing this world and the next, like the servants of the court of the world's just king, supported, victorious, triumphant, holder of the reins of mankind, protector of the frontiers of Islam, heir to the kingdom of Solomon, most just of the kings of the age, victor of the world and the faith, Atabak Abu Bakr Sa'd, may God prolong his days and grant victory to his banners. A father never shows his son the kindness that your generous hand has shown to the house of Adam. God wished to have mercy on a world, so through His mercy He made you king of the world. When the judge brought his words to this end and rode the horse of exaggeration past the bounds of our reckoning, we submitted to the ruling of fate, let bygones be bygones, and after the quarrel took the path of gentleness. We turned to make amends, each stepping toward the other's foot, and kissed each other's head and face, and the speech ended with this: Do not complain of the turning of the world, O dervish, for you would have died wretched anyway had things stayed this way. O rich man, since you have both heart and a prospering hand, eat and give, for you have won both this world and the next.