and they begged him, saying, “Our master, stay the day with us; relate things to us and converse with us.”
He replied, “The Gospel has taught me that when a person intends a good deed he should not postpone it.”
He then rose, and the scholars kissed his hands and his cloak while he kept repeating, “I counsel you never to make light of disobeying God, and never to be self-admiring because of a good deed you perform.”
He walked from Nasibīn to the Holy Land for a whole month—marching by day and standing in prayer by night—until he entered Jerusalem. There he spent another month, praying night and day. The scholars of Jerusalem gathered around him and asked me to approach him, so I did, and he turned to me and spoke exactly as he had the first time.
When he began to speak, the Jerusalem scholars thronged about him, keeping me from him the entire day and night. At dawn they grew weary and dispersed. He then said to me, “My dear son, I would like to rest my head for a short while. When the sun reaches my feet, wake me.”
There were still about two cubits before the sunlight touched him. When it did, I felt compassion for the long hardship he had borne in worship, so I let him sleep. When the sun reached his navel, its heat woke him.
He asked, “Why did you not wake me?”
I said, “I took pity on you because of all your exertion.”
He replied, “I do not like a single hour to pass in which I do not remember God and worship Him. Could you not have shown me mercy by sparing me a long standing on the Day of Reckoning? My son, I intend to set out for a mountain where there are one hundred and fifty men—the worst of them is better than I am. Will you accompany me?”
I said, “Yes.”
He rose, and a blind man at the door clung to him, saying, “Abū al-Faḍl, are you leaving before granting me any benefit?” He passed his hand over the man’s face, and the man could see.
A cripple beside the blind man sprang forward, seized him, and said, “Bestow upon me some of what God has bestowed upon you—may He grant you Paradise.” He passed his hand over him, and the man stood up cured. The monk then went on his way.
I looked to the right and left and saw no one. I entered the sanctuary of Jerusalem and found a man in a corner wearing a coarse woollen cloak. I sat until he finished. Then I said, “Servant of God, what…"