63 – ʿAbd Allāh narrated to us; Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥusayn then related to me; Yūsuf ibn al-Ḥakam al-Raqqī in turn related to me, saying:

Fayyāḍ ibn Muḥammad ibn Sinān recounted: Mughiṯ al-Aswad—one of the most upright clients of the Umayyads—said to me, while we were at Dayr al-Khalq:

“Why do I see you perpetually sorrowful?”

I replied, “My absence has been prolonged, my road is distant, and the journey has become exceedingly hard for me.”

He said, “To Allah we belong and to Him we return! I had thought you were one of Allah’s workers upon His earth.”

I asked, “And what made you think otherwise?”

He said, “I imagined your grief was for yourself, but you are grieving only for someone else. Do you not know that the true seeker—his sorrow is ever renewed in the watches of the night, and in the watches of the day the very moments he feels joy he regards as moments of shortcoming? He and his household are weeping, grief-stricken, finding no place of rest on earth. You see him bewildered, fleeing with his religion, pre-occupied, laden with long-standing worry, worn down by distress. His sole concern is the Hereafter and reaching it; he pleads for deliverance from its perils.”

Then he said, “Hah, hah,” let his tears pour forth, and kept weeping until he fell unconscious.