A learned man being annoyed while writing a letter to one of his confidential friends, at the conduct of a person who, seated at his side, glanced out of the corner of his eye at his writing, wrote: “Had not a hireling thief been seated at my side and engaged in reading my letter I should have written to thee all my secrets.” The man said: “By God, my lord, I have neither read nor even looked at thy letter.” “Fool!” exclaimed the other; “how then canst thou say what thou now sayest?”
A mendicant once coming to beg something at the door of a house, the master of it called out to him from the interior: “Pray excuse me: the women of the house are not here.” The beggar retorted: “I wish for a morsel of bread, not to embrace the women of the house.”
A certain person made a claim of ten dirams on Júhí. The judge enquired: “Hast thou any testimony to offer?” On the answer being in the negative he continued: “Shall I put him on his oath?” “Of what value is his oath?” said the man in reply. “O judge of the Faithful,” then proposed Júhí in his turn, “there lives in my quarter of the town an Imám, temperate, truthful and beneficent, send for him and put him on his oath instead of me, that this man’s mind may be easy.”
A poet read me once a wretched ode—
Verse of the kind where “alif” finds no place.
I said the kind of verse that thou should’st make,
Is that in which no letter we could trace.