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Humble (retold by Nasruddin)
My beloveds, I remember a time long ago when I was
still a Mulla. I lived in a small town, just big enough for a real
mosque, with a beautiful mosaic wall. I remember one evening, we had
finished our prayers. The stars were clear and bright, and seemed to
fill the sky solidly with lights. I stood at the window, gazing at the
lights so far away, each one bigger than our world, and so distant from
us across vast reaches of space. I thought of how we walk this earth,
filled with our own importance, when we are just specks of dust. If you
walk out to the cliffs outside the town, a walk of half an hour at most,
you look back and you can see the town, but the people are too small to
see, even at that meager distance. When I think of the immensity of the
universe, I am filled with awe and reverece for power so great.
I was thinking such thoughts, looking out the window
of the mosque, and I realized I had fallen to my knees. "I am nothing,
nothing!" I cried, amazed and awestruck.
There was a certain well-to-do man of the town, a
kind man who wished to be thought very devout. He cared more for what
people thought of him than for what he actually was. He happened to walk
in and he saw and heard what passed. My beloveds, I was a little shy at
being caught in such a moment, but he rushed down, looking around in
the obvious hope someone was there to see him. He knelt beside me, and
with a final hopeful glance at the door through which he had just come,
he cried,
"I am nothing! I am nothing!"
It appears that the man who sweeps, a poor man from
the edge of the village, had entered the side door with his broom to
begin his night's work. He had seen us, and being a man of true faith
and honest simplicity, his face showed that he entertained some of the
same thoughts that had been laid on me by the hand of Allah (wonderful
is He). He dropped his broom and fell to his knees up there in a
shadowed corner, and said softly,
"I am nothing...I am nothing!"
The well-to-do man next to me nudged me with his elbow and said out of the side of his mouth,
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