Concept

This section of Jami's Baharestan narrates how Abdullah ibn Ja'far, halting at a palm grove, watches a black slave (its keeper) receive three loaves as his sole daily ration. When a hungry stray dog appears, the slave throws it all three loaves one after another, then resolves to fast himself. Asked why he preferred the animal over his own hunger, he answers that the dog is a stranger, seemingly come from far away and hungry, and he could not bear to leave it without food.

The passage dramatizes ithar (ایثار) — altruistic self-sacrifice, the ethical and Sufi ideal of preferring another's need over one's own, even toward a lowly stranger or animal. It teaches the reader to read the concrete anecdote as a parable of selfless generosity and compassion, the abstracted moral that the narrative frame is built to convey.