Once in Samarkand, hakim Iskander Zarames and Abdul-Wahab al-Hindi, turning the corner of a large house, heard wild screams.
“They’re torturing some poor guy,” said al-Hindi, frozen in place.
The screams intensified.
— Ease his suffering? - Zarames asked.
- Certainly. This is within your power, as a saint, if God grants it.
“Okay,” said the hakim, “watch me.”
And he walked five steps away from the corner of the house. The screams stopped.
- You moved away - and everything became quiet! “But I always thought that it is proximity to the sufferer that eases his pain,” said al-Hindi.
Hakim smiled, but did not say anything, making a gesture that among the Sufis means: “The state of the questioner at the moment is such that the question can be left unanswered.”
Many years later, when al-Hindi was in Morocco, in the closed city of Mula Idris, one night he heard a certain dervish telling a group of disciples about what he had once experienced.
Among other things, the dervish said this:
“Many years ago, on one of the days of the month of Ramadan al-Mubarak, I was seized as a beggar, a ragged vagabond, and placed in a stone bag in the house of the qadi, who administered justice. The cell had two walls adjacent to the outer corner of the house facing the street. The house was located in the northern part of the city. Resigned to my fate, I sat in silent contemplation and suddenly clearly felt the presence of a holy man - he was outside and very close. I howled and screamed, throwing myself against the walls, because I felt his strength and passionately wanted to get closer to him, but I could not break free. Then I realized that he had moved away, as if my screams had scared him away. I tried to attract him again, calming down, becoming quiet as the night.
The sheikh, sitting in a circle with the dervishes, said:
— Your experience provided you with the opportunity to learn that baraka (spiritual power) has the most profound effect when you are deprived of the opportunity to use it for utilitarian purposes. Vali passed on this knowledge to you, despite the fact that you were languishing in prison, while those around you could mistake his actions for something else or simply not notice anything.
Al-Hindi says:
“Thanks to this incident, it finally dawned on me that there is nothing “miraculous” about spiritual experiences of this kind, and in fact one should be surprised at how few people there are who have experienced something like this. What is even more surprising is that instead of learning from their experiences, people idolize such experiences, mistaking them for something they are not.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru