The Speech of Saints

To understand the strength of Allah we must first have belief in Allah. So the very first obligation is that we must believe in the power of the All-True, in His power over everything and this is the most elementary belief in Allah. Mawlana al-Shaykh (‘Abd Allah al-Daghistani ق) told me the story of a man who was making ablution while the muezzin was raising the call to prayer. There was by him one of the possessors of a spiritual state who was also making ablution. The latter saw a sesame seed and said, “Glory to Him Whose affair is so great that He can cause the universe with all its immensity to enter inside a sesame seed without reducing its size and without increasing the size of the sesame seed!” The other man said, “This is the speech of mad people. Allah has power to do that, but He must increase the size of the sesame seed of reduce the size of the universe.”

As soon as he uttered this statement his foot slipped and he fell into the water gutter. He disappeared from the place of ablution and reappeared at the shore where all the water drains end up, but he was in the form of a donkey. A man ran to him, held him by the ears, hit him, rode on top of him and kept him in his possession for seven years, using him in his service. After all these years passed the donkey came one day to drink at that same shore. Its foot slipped and he reappeared at the same spot where he had made ablution seven years before, finding the same man next to him again, and the muezzin had not yet finished raising the prayer. Immediately he said, “I repent and return to Allah! Now I know.” The possessor of the spiritual state asked him, “Is He qādir muqtadir (Able, All-Able) or not?”

Translated from the Arabic by Shaykh Gibril Fouad Haddad ﵀