Two old men, who had been friends in early youth, met after an interval of many years. A cordial greeting ensued, and then one of them asked the other: "How old are you now?" He said: "Thank God, I am in good health." "Are you well-off in worldly goods?" "Thank God, I am in debt to no man." "Have you any special trouble of mind?" "Thank God, I have no young children." "Have you any enemies?" "Thank God, I have no near relations."
THE THREE SORTS OF HAPPY MEN
In two verses of poetry, Al-Mutanabbi, one of the greatest Arabian poets and philosophers, reduces the number of happy men to three classes. They have been paraphrased and put into English verse by a friend, as follows:
To three life seems a summer sky:
The first who has no mind to know
The heights and depths of life below,
Nor ever asks the reason why.
The second he to whom life's sum
Is self at ease; who never lets
The past disturb with dark regrets,
Nor hopes and fears from days to come.
The third who, led by fancies crude,
In scorn of truth, deceived at heart,
Makes fruitless dreams his better part,
And hollow hopes the highest good.
CYNICAL VIEWS OF LIFE
Abu'l-Ala was another great poet-philosopher. He lost his sight from small-pox early in life, was a cynic and pessimist, and may have often been copied by Omar Khayyam. He refers to his affliction and to the fact that he lived and died an unmarried man (so as to have no children) in a well-known verse:
"Here am I—wronged by my father
Who gave me birth—while I have done wrong to no one."
Some of his poetry has been put into English quatrains by Ameen F. Rihany, in imitation of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, and the following, from the Quatrains of Abu'l-Ala, are a few striking examples: