behave towards travellers with this impropriety. Nothing derived from associating with ill-mannered persons is more useful than the lesson that you must endure their disagreeable behaviour and must not imitate it. On the other hand, if a travelling dervish becomes at his ease (_munbasiṭ_) with a resident and stays for some time and makes a worldly demand, the resident is bound immediately to give him what he wants; but if the traveller is an impostor and low-minded, the resident must not act meanly in order to comply with his impossible requirements, for this is not the way of those who are devoted to God. What business has a dervish to associate with devotees if he needs worldly things? Let him go to the market and buy and sell, or let him be a soldier at the sultan’s court. It is related that, while Junayd and his pupils were sitting occupied in some ascetic discipline, a travelling dervish came in. They exerted themselves to entertain him and placed food before him. He said: “I want such and such a thing besides this.” Junayd said to him: “You must go to the bazaar, for you are a man of the market, not of the mosque and the cell.” Once I set out from Damascus with two dervishes to visit Ibn al-Mu`allá,[171] who was living in the country near Ramla. On the way we arranged that each of us should think of the matter concerning which we were in doubt, in order that that venerable director might tell us our secret thoughts and solve our difficulties. I said to myself: “I will desire of him the poems and intimate supplications (_munáját_) of Ḥusayn b. Manṣúr (al-Ḥalláj).” One of my companions said, “I will desire him to pray that my disease of the spleen (_ṭiḥál_) may become better;” and the other said, “I will wish for sweetmeat of different colours” (_ḥalwá-yi ṣábúní_). As soon as we arrived, Ibn al-Mu`allá commanded that a manuscript of the poems and supplications of Ḥusayn should be presented to me, and laid his hand on the belly of the invalid so that his illness was assuaged, and said to the other dervish: “Parti-coloured sweetmeat is eaten by soldiers (_`awánán_); you are dressed as a saint, and the dress of a saint does not accord with the appetite of a soldier. Choose one or the other.” Footnote 171: I. Ibn al-`Alá.