An Arab visiting Hasan Basri asked him for a definition of patience. Hasan answered, "There are two kinds of patience; one kind consists in bearing afflictions and calamities bravely and in abstaining from what the Lord has forbidden, the other kind consists in never lending an ear to the suggestions of Satan." "As for me," said the Arab, "I have never seen anyone more retiring from the world and more patient than thyself." "Alas," answered Hasan, "my renouncement of the world and my patience count as nothing." "Why dost thou say so?" exclaimed the Arab. "Because, if I practise renouncement it is only from dread of hell-fire, and if I keep patient it is only because I hope to enter Paradise. Now that man alone deserves to be taken into account who, without self-regarding motives practises patience for the sake of the Most High, and whose renouncement of the world has not Paradise for its object, but only the desire to please God. Such a way of acting is a manifest sign of sincerity of heart." Asked on another occasion what his spiritual state was like, Hasan replied, "My state is like that of a man shipwrecked in the sea, who is clinging to a solitary plank." He never laughed. At the moment of death he smiled once, and called out "What sin? What sin?" Someone saw him after his death in a dream, and asked him, "O Hasan Basri, thou who never wert in the habit of smiling, why, when dying, didst thou say with a smile, 'What sin? What sin?'" Hasan answered, "When I was dying I heard a voice which said, 'O Azrael, hold back his soul a little longer, it has still one sin,' and in my joy I exclaimed, 'What sin?'" The night of his death another of his friends had a dream, in which he saw the gates of heaven open and heard a voice proclaim, "Hasan Basri has come to his Lord, Who is satisfied with him." [8] These and the following eight sketches are taken from Attar's "Tazkirat-ul-Auliya." CHAPTER III RABIA, THE WOMAN SUFI Rabia, the daughter of Ismail, a woman celebrated for her holy life, and a native of Basra, belonged to the tribe of Adi. Al Qushairi says in his treatise on Sufism, "She used to say when holding converse with God, 'Consume with fire O God, a presumptuous heart which loveth Thee.' On one of these occasions a voice spoke to her and said, 'That we shall not do. Think not of us an ill thought.' Often in the silence of the night she would go on the roof of her house and say, 'The lover is now with his beloved, but I rejoice in being alone with Thee.'"