her hands were restored to her, goodlier than before. Then said they, "Knowest thou who we are?"; and she replied, "Allah is all knowing;"[1] and they said, "We are thy two Scones of Bread, which thou gayest in alms to the asker and which were the cause of the cutting off of thy hands.[2] So praise thou Allah Almighty for that He hath restored to thee thy hands and thy child." Then she praised Almighty Allah and glorified Him. And men relate a tale of
THE DEVOUT ISRAELITE.
There was once a devout man of the Children of Israel,[3] whose family span cotton-thread; and he used every day to sell the yarn and buy fresh cotton, and with the profit he laid in daily bread for his household. One morning he went out and sold the day's yarn as wont, when there met him one of his brethren, who complained to him of need; so he gave him the price of the thread and returned, empty-handed, to his family, who said to him, "Where is the cotton and the food?" Quoth he, "Such an one met me and complained to me of want; whereupon I gave him the price of the yarn." And they said, "How shall we do? We have nothing to sell." Now they had a cracked trencher[4] and a jar; so he took them
- ↑ Arab. "Allaho A'alam"; (God knows!) here the popular phrase for our, "I know not;" when it would be rude to say bluntly "M'adri"= "don't know."
- ↑ There is a picturesque Moslem idea that good deeds become incarnate and assume human shapes to cheer the doer in his grave, to greet him when he enters Paradise and so forth. It was borrowed from the highly imaginative faith of the Guebre, the Zoroastrian. On Chinavad or Chanyud-pul (Sirát), the Judgement bridge, 37 rods (rasan) long, straight and 37 fathoms broad for the good, and crooked and narrow as sword-edge for the bad, a nymph-like form will appear to the virtuous and say, "I am the personification of thy good deeds!" In Hell there will issue from a fetid gale a gloomy figure with head like a minaret, red eyeballs, hooked nose, teeth like pillars, spear-like fangs, snaky locks etc. and when asked who he is he will reply, "I am the personification of thine evil acts!" (Dabistan i. 285.) The Hindus also personify everything.
- ↑ Arab. "Banú Israíl;" applied to the Jews when theirs was the True Faith i.e. before the coming of Jesus, the Messiah, whose mission completed that of Moses and made it obsolete (Matrúk) even as the mission of Jesus was completed and abrogated by that of Mohammed. The term "Yahúd"=Jew is applied scornfully to the Chosen People after they rejected the Messiah, but as I have said "Israelite" is used on certain occasions, Jew on others.
- ↑ Arab. "Kasa'ah," a wooden bowl, a porringer; also applied to a saucer.
