3.1.36
Remember the day your preacher climbed the pulpit with frowns and scowls, issued threats and uttered disavowals, accused your adversaries of error and misbelief, urged you to fight and incited you to defend the right, then prayed and sought God’s clemency, asked His guidance and proclaimed that you’d surely achieve ascendancy—that day you raided your neighbors and violated all that your brothers held sacred, sundered suckling child from mother, woman from lover, fathers from the offspring they’d sired and all they owned and had acquired! Remember the day your leader mustered his lieutenants and urged family and friends to betray his liege lord (and what a betrayal!), all because he differed with him over assessments and estimations, interpretations and considerations, conclusions and explanations! Remember the day you marked yourselves with the tokens of holy struggle, saying, “This is God’s battle! This is a war for the Lord of Creation! This is the day to gain reward and from torment attain salvation—so overwhelm the enemy by land and sea and by this pious act win God’s approbation”! Remember the day you argued over what foods to eat and what drinks to drink, what water to use to wash the dead, on what kind of bedding to lay your head, what clothes to wear, how a certain phrase might best be said, how to arrange table, chair, and bed? Were you placed in this world only to quarrel? Were you commanded to fight and squabble? How come the doctors of mathematics, geometry, and astronomy don’t differ over their proofs, or if they do, don’t set the world to the torch to assert their truths, while you set fire to it at every chance you find, with every fancy that comes to mind? You’d do better to agree on a single view, as have they, and to the needs of God’s flock attention pay, than to drive them into such a strait and in such sticky matters implicate, to guide them to the straightest path to follow than muddle them in such a murky wallow. Leave them to strive for their daily fare and don’t ask them to grasp what’s over your head and theirs. And you too, work two hours with your hands for every hour you do with your darting tongues, and agree beforehand that, when preferences differ, you’ll be friendly and submissive to one another. Have you forgotten what it says in that Book of Psalms that you canter through and cantillate, that you so adulate, and to which you have for so long adhered: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron’s beard”?6
3.1.37
Verily I say unto you, “Do not forbid what God has made lawful unto you by way of good things, and do not seek officiously to uncover other men’s sins! Do not sell the goods stored up for you in Paradise by being on earth men of idleness and lies! For a Market-man to marry a Bag-woman is no shame and if a Bag-man marries a Market-woman there’s no blame, for differences regarding the Unknown are matters of surmise and should pose no obstacle to the carrying off of such a prize,7 whose value is by the unschooled as appreciated as it is by the educated. Are you not aware that ‘wombs’ (arḥām) from ‘mercy’ (raḥmah) are derived, that they were designed that men might, through marriage, be allied, and that the word to ‘ties of kinship’ is applied,8 for brotherhood and harmony were created, to mutual affection dedicated, and for the seizing of fortune’s offerings designated? Why then do you hold yourselves from such things at a distance, withdrawing and showing resistance? Why do you all in the ocean of doubt and suspicion wade, why make commerce from surmise and therein trade? God will never listen to the prayer of you Orientals unless it first be approved by the Occidentals,9 nor will you be to the next world admitted unless your conduct in this world to this model you have fitted. Let then now the towheaded man shake hands with the black, the round-headed-with-bonnet with the cone-headed-with-cap. Let each of you harbor toward his brother pure and loving intentions and fulfill toward him his obligations. Then, since your disagreements with regard to Creation will have ceased, you’ll not differ as to the Creator, for He is Lord of all that’s west and east. It is His desire that the Orientals among you, should they travel to the west, should be welcomed by its people and taken to their breast.” Accept this advice and listen to what comes next by way of choice phrases and witty topoi in the text of this coming chapter which I have named