1.12.3
When dinnertime came, the same young monk brought a dish of lentils cooked in oil and three “cymbals” of that bread and placed them before the Fāriyāq, who then sat down to eat, taking a piece of bread and whacking it against another until it broke. When he took the first mouthful a sliver of the bread caught against a tooth and almost carried it off. The Fāriyāq tried to prop it up and fill the holes in the tooth with lentils but hardly had he finished his meal before the heat of the lentils started to grow in his body and he took to scratching with his fingernails and fragments of the loaf until his skin was in shreds. This upset him greatly and he said to himself, “That crust almost dislodged my tooth, so I’m going to dislodge one of the monastery’s,” and he cudgeled his brains to compose a couple of lines of verse on lentils to avenge himself for what it had done to him, in imitation of the custom of poets of getting their own back by rebuking fate for any ill-fortune or depression, wretchedness or oppression they may have suffered.
1.12.4
Searching for a certain word, he rose and went looking for a copy of the Qāmūs and knocked on the door of his neighbor, who was one of those particularly zealous in religion, and asked him, “Do you have, sir, a Qāmūs?” to which the other replied, “In the monastery we have neither qāmūs nor jāmūs (‘buffaloes’) nor oxen, and what would you be needing them for at this hour, anyway?” So he knocked on the door of another who was even coarser and asked him, “Would you mind lending me the Qāmūs for an hour?” to which he replied, “Hang on till midnight, for the kābūs (‘nightmare’) never comes at any other time.” So he went to another and asked him the same question and the man replied, “What qāmūṣ, you māghūṣ?”218 So he returned to his cell, saying, “I’ll have to compose the lines and leave a space for the missing word,” and he wrote,
I ate lentils in a monastery of an evening,
Then spent the night with an itch that my mind did almost derange.
Had I not set my nails to working,
Men would have said, “The Fāriyāq’s got *****!”
1.12.5
When it was midnight and the Fāriyāq was sleeping, one of the monks suddenly knocked on his door. Thinking that he’d brought the book he wanted, he opened the door in expectation of finding what he’d been looking for, only for the monk to tell him, “Get up and come to prayers. Lock your door and follow me.” Then the Fāriyāq recalled what his neighbor had said about the nightmare not coming till midnight and said to himself, “The man spoke truly, for this summoner is harder on the sleeper than a nightmare. Damn this for a wretched night for me: the bread almost pulled out my tooth and the lentils made me scratch, and now I’d barely started to doze off when this miserable scald-headed door-striker comes and summons me to prayer. Was my father a monk or my mother a nun, or have I incurred some other obligation, to have to give thanks and perform prayers for the sake of a dish of lentils? All the same, I shall endure until morning.”
1.12.6
Next day, the same young monk came to ask him how he was, for he had joined the monastery only a little while before and still retained some traces of finer feeling and kindness. “I beg you,” said the Fāriyāq, “do sit with me a little,” and when the man had taken his seat, he asked him, “Tell me, if you’d be so kind, do you do that every day?” The young monk frowned at him and thought his question odd. Then he said, “What are you alluding to?” The Fāriyāq replied, “Eat lentils in the evening and get up at midnight to pray.” “Yes indeed,” he answered. “Such is our custom every day.” “What imposed this duty upon you?” said the Fāriyāq. “The need to worship God and become closer to him,” he replied. The Fāriyāq responded, “God, Blessed and Mighty, doesn’t care whether a person eats lentils or meat, and he didn’t command any such thing in His Book, as there is no benefit therein, for the soul of the eater or for the eaten.” “This is the way of the contemplative ascetics,” said the other, “for a life of abnegation and chastisement of the body through eating the worst foods and reduction of sleep drives away the appetites.”
1.12.7
“On the contrary,” said the Fāriyāq, “it is inconsistent with God’s will, for had He wanted to chastise your body and free it of its appetites, He would have created you emaciated and sickly. What say you about those whom God has created beautiful? Is such a person allowed to disfigure his face, gouge out an eye, pierce his nose, slit his lip, or pull out his teeth — as you wanted to pull out my teeth yesterday with that hard bread of yours — or to blacken his appearance?” Said the other, “In my opinion, that would not be allowed.” Said the Fāriyāq, “Isn’t the body as a whole analogous to the face? I swear, God cannot have created a well-muscled forearm without wanting it to remain a well-muscled forearm, or a leg rippling with muscles without wanting it to stay that way for ever. Nor would he have made it permissible to people to eat good foods unless he had wanted them to eat them in blooming good health. True, some eccentric religions have forbidden these good foods, but the Christian religion permits them and they only came to be prohibited because of a few aging dodderers who didn’t care for meat or anything else. What is your objection to eating them every day?”
1.12.8
“I don’t know,” said the other, “but I heard our scholars say it was so, so I imitated them, and to tell you the truth, I’ve grown sick of this life. I see my body wasting away day by day and my spirit becoming dejected, and if I’d known beforehand how I’d end up, I never would have taken this path. My father and mother, though, are poor and were afraid I’d end up unemployed and idle, for there are no useful crafts in our land for a person to learn and live by, so they painted me a pretty picture of the monk’s life. They told me that if I stuck to the path in the monastery for a few years, I might be promoted to a high rank, ‘and do yourself some good and us too.’ They kept on at me until I agreed, and if I hadn’t done so of my own free will, they would have forced me into it.”
1.12.9
The Fāriyāq told him, “It’s true: the monastic life is a refuge from unemployment, for anyone who’s too idle to have acquired any knowledge or a craft makes a beeline for it. But you’re still a young man like me, so you can go to any person of good will and charity and he will direct you to something that will help you. The Almighty created the jaws and He’s guaranteed the daily bread to fill those maws, just as He’s made action the key to benefaction. Moreover, you will be aware that the word rahbāniyyah (‘monasticism’) derives from rahbah (‘fear’), meaning fear of Almighty God. It you adopt a profession, make your living from it among your fellow men, marry, and are blessed with a child, you will have manifested fear of God and will then be rāhib (‘god-fearing/a monk’). True rahbāniyyah doesn’t depend on eating lentils and dry bread. Isn’t it the case that there’s more quarreling, name-calling, and grudge-bearing among the monks of your monastery than among other people, that their chief never stops trying to humiliate them and force them to submit to him, that they never stop grumbling and complaining about him, and that there’s as much envy and competitiveness between him and the other heads of monasteries as there is among the ministers of the world’s countries? Most of them obtain their posts by flattering the ruling emir or the patriarch, and when they feel their terms are approaching their end and fear dismissal, you find them showering people of influence with gifts and presents such as the ordinary people of our land would never give and continuing to do so until they are confirmed in their positions as heads of their monasteries.