have
made thee ruler over thyself. If thou rulest thine own body and keepest
it constant in the service of the Lord, that is better than ruling a
nation for a thousand years. Again, Omar, the son of Abd al Aziz, being
installed on the throne of the Caliphate, sent for three of his intimate
friends, and said to them, 'Behold me caught in the toils of the
Caliphate; how shall I get rid of them? Many people consider power a
blessing; I regard it as a calamity.'"

Then Fudhayl added, "O Harun, if thou wishest to escape the punishment
of the Day of Judgment, regard each old man among the Moslems as thy
father, the young men as thy brothers, the women as thy sisters. O
Harun, I fear lest thy handsome visage be scorched by the flames of
hell. Fear the Most High, and know that He will interrogate thee on the
Day of Resurrection." At these words, Harun-al-Rashid wept copiously.
Then Fazl said to Fudhayl, "Say no more; you have killed the Caliph with
grief." "Oh Haman!"[14] Fudhayl answered, "it is not I, it is thou and
thy relations who have misled the Caliph and destroyed him." Hearing
these words, Harun-al-Rashid wept still more bitterly, and said to Fazl,
"Be silent! If he has called you Haman, he has (tacitly) compared me to
Pharaoh." Then, addressing Fudhayl, he asked him, "Have you any debt to
pay?" "Yes," he answered, "that of the service which I owe to the Most
High. He furnishes me with subsistence, I have no need to borrow." Then
Harun-al-Rashid placed in Fudhayl's hand a purse in which were a
thousand pieces of gold, saying, "This money is lawfully acquired, I
have inherited it from my mother." "Ah!" exclaimed Fudhayl, "my advice
has been wasted; my object in giving it was to lighten thy burden; thou
seekest to make mine more heavy." At these words, Harun-al-Rashid rose,
saluted him, and departed. All the way home he kept repeating to
himself, "This Fudhayl is a great teacher." On another occasion the
Caliph is reported to have said to Fudhayl, "How great is thy
self-abnegation," to which Fudhayl made answer, "Thine is greater." "How
so?" said the Caliph. "Because I make abnegation of this world, and thou
makest abnegation of the next; now this world is transitory, and the
next will endure for ever."

Sofian Tsavri relates the following anecdote. "One night I was talking
with Fudhayl, and after we had been conversing on all kinds of subjects,
I said to him, 'What a pleasant evening we have had, and what
interesting