Original content

English translation

A learned man who had an ugly face and a repugnant appearance came upon Farazdaq. He saw that his face had turned yellow on account of an illness. He said: What has befallen you that your complexion has turned so yellow? He said: When I saw you, I thought about my own sins, and my complexion turned so yellow. He said: At the moment of seeing me, why did you call your sins to mind? He said: I feared that God the Exalted would punish me and disfigure me as He has disfigured you. When I behold your ugly face, my heart annuls the bond of persistence in sin; Because I fear that, through the ill-omen of sin, the wrath of God might disfigure me as it did you. And this same learned man says: I was standing on a road with a friend, and we were talking, when a woman came and stood before me and kept gazing at my face. When her gazing exceeded all bounds, I told my servant: Go to that woman and ask what is the matter. The servant came back saying: She says, 'My eye had committed a grievous sin; I wished to inflict some punishment upon it, and I found no punishment greater than to make it gaze upon this ugly face!' The record of the pupil of my eye was not washed clean of sin, though I filled it with water two hundred times through weeping; So that it might escape the fire of tomorrow's Resurrection, today I tormented it by making it gaze upon your ugly face.