Jaʿfar at Minā, and I said to him, “Fear Allah! You were elevated to this station and installed in this position only by the swords of the Emigrants and the Helpers, yet their children are dying of hunger. When ʿUmar performed the ḥajj he spent no more than fifteen dinars and lodged beneath the trees.”

He replied, “Do you want me to live as you do?”

I said, “No—but something less than what you enjoy and a little more than what I have.”

He said, “Leave.” (1)

ʿIṣām ibn Yazīd said: When Sufyān wanted to send me to al-Mahdī I told him, “I am a rustic youth; I might make a mistake and bring shame upon you.”

He answered, “O Naʿis! Do you see these people (2) who come to me? If I were to ask any one of them for something he would think I had bestowed a favor upon him, yet I have approved of you. Say what you know and do not say what you do not know.”

When I came back I asked him, “Why do you avoid him when he says, ‘If he came I would go out with him to the market and together we would command and forbid’?”

He replied, “O Naʿis! First let him act on what he already knows; once he does that, we would have no option but to go to him and teach him what he does not know.”

ʿIṣām continued: Sufyān gave me letters for al-Mahdī and for his minister Abū ʿUbayd Allah. I was admitted to the minister, and after some conversation he said, “Had Abū ʿAbd Allāh come to us, we would have placed our hands in his, put on one cloak, wrapped another round our waists, gone out to the market, enjoined what is right, and forbidden what is wrong. But when a man like Abū ʿAbd Allāh is out of sight, your reciters—the very ones you call reciters—come to me, commanding, forbidding, exhorting; by Allah, they weep for me and I pretend to weep for them. Then, before long, one of them pulls from his sleeve a slip of paper: ‘Do such-and-such for me; do such-and-such for me.’ I oblige them and come to resent them.”

He had written merely because his flight had gone on too long and he wanted a pledge of safety. So I came to him (3) and arrived