Faridaddin Attar tells in his book Ilahi-Nama (Book of the Divine) that once upon a time there lived a virtuous woman named Marhuma, whose name means “She on whom mercy has fallen”, her fate is similar to the fate of the teaching.
Her husband went on a pilgrimage and left her in the care of his younger brother. Some time passed, and the brother fell in love with Marhuma and began to seek her love. She rejected him, but he made threats. And when she did not comply, he bribed four witnesses and accused her of adultery. The court found her guilty, and she was stoned and left to die in the desert.
She lay there all night, and in the morning her moans were heard by a desert Arab passing by. He asked her who she was and she replied that she was sick. The Arab took her with him and decided to take care of her.
After some time, she came to her senses, and the Arab, seeing her beauty, invited her to become his wife.
“But I’m already my husband’s wife!” - she answered. She touched him so much with her pleas that he left her alone, making her his sister.
The Arab had a slave, who also naturally fell in love and, being in turn rejected, harbored a grudge against Marhuma. One night he sneaked into the master's chambers and killed the Arab child, throwing a bloody knife under Marhume's pillow. When the child's mother came in the morning to feed him, she discovered the murder and, following the bloody trail, found a dagger under the pillow.
The Arab asked Marhuma why she repaid his kindness with such black ingratitude, but in the end she managed to convince him of her innocence. However, the Arab understood that after the shock that his wife experienced, she would always associate Marhuma with the death of her son and, sooner or later, a misfortune would occur. He was forced to send Marhuma away.
The expression of the Teaching in stories, exercises, thoughts and actions will always be defenseless, like Marhuma, and will just as often be betrayed and perceived falsely. The wealth of forms in which Sufism appears is limitless, some of them have a bright past, others are associated with unacceptable things, and all this is the result of events like those that happened to Marhuma while her husband was away from home.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru