“So they both went on, till they embarked in a boat and he (Khadir) staved it in. ‘What!’ cried Moses, ‘hast thou staved it in that thou mayst drown its crew? Verily, a strange thing hast thou done.’ “He said, ‘Did not I tell thee that thou couldst no way have patience with me?’ “Then they went on until they met a youth, and he slew him. Said Moses, ‘Hast thou slain him who is free from guilt of blood? Surely now thou hast wrought an unheard-of thing!’” After Moses had broken his promise of silence for the third time, Khadir resolved to leave him. “But first,” he said, “I will tell thee the meaning of that with which thou couldst not have patience. As to the boat, it belonged to poor men, toilers on the sea, and I was minded to damage it, for in their rear was a king who seized on every boat by force. And as to the youth, his parents were believers, and I feared lest he should trouble them by error and unbelief.” The Sūfīs are fond of quoting this unimpeachable testimony that the _walī_ is above human criticism, and that his hand, as Jalāluddīn asserts, is even as the hand of God. Most Moslems admit the claim to be valid in so far as they shrink from applying conventional standards of morality to holy men. I have explained its metaphysical justification in an earlier chapter. A miracle performed by a saint is termed _karāmāt_, _i.e._ a ‘favour’ which God bestows upon him, whereas a miracle performed by a prophet is called _muʿjizat_, _i.e._ an act which cannot be imitated by any one. The distinction originated in controversy, and was used to answer those who held the miraculous powers of the saints to be a grave encroachment on the prerogative of the Prophet. Sūfī apologists, while confessing that both kinds of miracle are substantially the same, take pains to differentiate the characteristics of each; they declare, moreover, that the saints are the Prophet’s witnesses, and that all their miracles (like ‘a drop trickling from a full skin of honey’) are in reality derived from him. This is the orthodox view and is supported by those Mohammedan mystics who acknowledge the Law as well as the Truth, though in some cases it may have amounted to little more than a pious opinion. We have often noticed the difficulty in which the Sūfīs find themselves when they try to make a logical compromise with Islam. But the word ‘logic’ is very misleading in this connexion. The beginning of wisdom, for European students of Oriental religion, lies in the discovery that incongruous beliefs--I mean, of course, beliefs which _our_ minds cannot harmonise--dwell peacefully together in the Oriental brain; that their owner is quite unconscious of their incongruity; and that, as a rule, he is absolutely sincere. Contradictions which seem glaring to us do not trouble him at all.