Then Fudhayl added, "O Harun, if thou wishest to escape the punishment of the Day of Judgment, regard each old man among the Moslems as thy father, the young men as thy brothers, the women as thy sisters. O Harun, I fear lest thy handsome visage be scorched by the flames of hell. Fear the Most High, and know that He will interrogate thee on the Day of Resurrection." At these words, Harun-al-Rashid wept copiously. Then Fazl said to Fudhayl, "Say no more; you have killed the Caliph with grief." "Oh Haman!"[14] Fudhayl answered, "it is not I, it is thou and thy relations who have misled the Caliph and destroyed him." Hearing these words, Harun-al-Rashid wept still more bitterly, and said to Fazl, "Be silent! If he has called you Haman, he has (tacitly) compared me to Pharaoh." Then, addressing Fudhayl, he asked him, "Have you any debt to pay?" "Yes," he answered, "that of the service which I owe to the Most High. He furnishes me with subsistence, I have no need to borrow." Then Harun-al-Rashid placed in Fudhayl's hand a purse in which were a thousand pieces of gold, saying, "This money is lawfully acquired, I have inherited it from my mother." "Ah!" exclaimed Fudhayl, "my advice has been wasted; my object in giving it was to lighten thy burden; thou seekest to make mine more heavy." At these words, Harun-al-Rashid rose, saluted him, and departed. All the way home he kept repeating to himself, "This Fudhayl is a great teacher." On another occasion the Caliph is reported to have said to Fudhayl, "How great is thy self-abnegation," to which Fudhayl made answer, "Thine is greater." "How so?" said the Caliph. "Because I make abnegation of this world, and thou makest abnegation of the next; now this world is transitory, and the next will endure for ever."
Sofian Tsavri relates the following anecdote. "One night I was talking with Fudhayl, and after we had been conversing on all kinds of subjects, I said to him, 'What a pleasant evening we have had, and what interesting conversation.' 'No,' he said, 'neither the evening nor the conversation have been good.' 'Why so?' I remarked. 'Because,' he said, 'you sought to speak words which might please me, and I sought to answer so as to gratify you. Both of us, pre-occupied with our talk, had forgotten the Most High. It would be better for each of us to sit still in his place and to lift up his heart towards God.'"
A stranger coming to Fudhayl one day was asked by the latter for what purpose he came. "I have come," he answered, "to talk with you, and to find in so doing calm of mind," "That is to say," broke in Fudhayl, "you wish to mislead me with lies, and desire me to do the same to you. Be off about your business."
[15]But with all his austerity of life, his prolonged fasts and watchings, his ragged dress and wearisome pilgrimages, he preferred the practice of interior virtue and purity of intention to all outward observances, and used often to say that "he who is modest and compliant to others and lives in meekness and patience gains a higher reward by so doing than if he fasted all his days and watched in prayer all his nights." At so high a price did he place obedience to a spiritual guide, and so necessary did he deem it, that he declared, "Had I a promise of whatever I should ask in prayer, yet would I not offer that prayer save in union with a superior."
But his favourite virtue was the love of God in perfect conformity to His will above all hope or fear. Thus, when his only son (whose virtues resembled his father's) died in early age, Fudhayl was seen with a countenance of unusual cheerfulness, and, being asked by his intimate disciple, Abou Ali, the reason wherefore, he answered, "It was God's good pleasure, and it is therefore my good pleasure also."
Others of his sayings are the following: "To leave aught undone for the esteem of men is hypocrisy, and to do ought for their esteem is idolatry." "Much is he beguiled who serves God for fear or hope, for His true service is for mere love." "I serve God because I cannot help serving Him for very love's sake."
[13] Koran, Sura 57, v 15.
[14] According to the Koran, Haman was the vizier of Pharaoh whom he misled by bad advice.
[15] Vide Palgrave: "Asceticism among Mohammedan nations."