to you.”

He then began to address the people. One day a young Christian, disguised as a Muslim, came to him and asked, “What is the meaning of the Prophet’s ﷺ saying: ‘Beware the insight (firāsah) of the believer, for he sees with the light of Allah’ (1)?”

“I lowered my head,” Junayd related, “then raised it toward him and said, ‘Accept Islam, for the time of your submission has arrived.’ The young man thereupon embraced Islam (2).”

Junayd also said, “Nothing has ever benefited me as much as a few verses I once heard a slave-girl singing in an upper room:

If I say, ‘Separation has robed me in decay’s attire,’
you answer, ‘Were it not for distance, love would never taste so sweet.’
And if I say, ‘This heart has been consumed by longing,’
you say, ‘It is the fire of yearning that ennobles the heart.’
And if I say, ‘I have done no wrong,’ she answers,
‘Your very life is a sin beside which no other sin compares.’

“I was overwhelmed; I cried out and lost consciousness. The owner of the house came out and said, ‘Master, what has happened to you?’ I replied, ‘Because of what I have just heard.’ He said, ‘She is my gift to you.’ I said, ‘I accept her—and she is free for the sake of Allah.’ I later married her to a man, and she bore him a righteous son who made the pilgrimage on foot thirty times.

Saʿīd ibn Ismāʿīl (4)—the son of Saʿīd ibn Manṣūr, known as Abū ʿUthmān the preacher—was born in al-Rayy and raised there, then moved to Nishapur, where he lived until his death; he also visited Baghdad. People used to say that his supplications were always answered.

Al-Khaṭīb (5) said: ʿAbd al-Karīm ibn Hawāzin told us, “I heard Abū ʿUthmān say, ‘For forty years Allah has not kept me in a state I disliked, nor moved me from one state to another and I resented it.’”

Abū ʿUthmān often recited (6):

I have done wrong and failed to do right, and I flee to You—
where can a servant escape from his Master?
He hopes for forgiveness; and if that hope is dashed,
none on earth would be more forsaken than he.