an unalloyed non-Arab, virtually tongue-tied—am I to address the eloquent people of Baghdad?!

He answered, “You have committed to memory jurisprudence, its legal theory, the points of controversy, grammar, lexicology, and Qur’an commentary. And you still think you are unfit to speak? Climb onto the chair and speak, for I see in you a bunch of dates that will grow into a towering palm.”

Al-Jubbaʾī relates: Shaykh ʿAbd al-Qādir said to me,

“I was given orders and prohibitions in both sleep and wakefulness. Speech would overwhelm me; if I did not voice it, it crowded my heart until I almost choked and could not keep silent. At first only two or three men sat with me; then the people heard of me and crowds pressed in until nearly seventy thousand attended my gathering.

“I examined every kind of deed and found none superior to feeding others. I would wish the whole world were in my hand so that I might feed the hungry. My palm is as though pierced—I cannot hold on to anything. If a thousand dinars came to me, I would not keep them overnight.

“When anyone brought me gold I would say, ‘Put it beneath the prayer-mat.’

“I long to be back in the deserts and wastelands as I was at first, seeing no one and being seen by no one.

“But Allah has willed that I benefit His creatures: more than five hundred have embraced Islam at my hand, and over one hundred thousand have repented through me—and that is abundant good. Burdens descend upon me that, were they laid upon mountains, would cause them to crumble; yet I place my side on the ground and say, ‘Surely with hardship comes ease, surely with hardship comes ease,’ then I raise my head and the burden has lifted.

“Whenever a child is born to me, I take him in my hands and say, ‘This one is dead,’ thus removing him from my heart; so when he dies, his death leaves no trace in me.”

ʿAbd al-Razzāq, the Shaykh’s son, said: “My father had forty-nine children—twenty-seven boys and the rest girls.” ⦗1⦘