A friend of mine told me this story:
When I was young I had a Shaikh, one of the greatest human beings I have ever
known. I had met him quite by accident. He lived in a small shack in a poor
neighborhood. I had to deliver some medicine for my father’s pharmacy. Once
inside this man’s quarters I realized I was in the presence of someone quite
unusual. For one thing, he possessed the relics of several great sheikhs of
different orders. The day I met him he was having a conversation with two other
young men about my own age. Their names were Metin and Refik. After hearing
their conversaation I began to lose interest in the things that had occupied
me. I wanted only to attend these coversations. The three of us were learing so
much that wished that more and more people could also hear these conversations.
We begged our sheikh to allow the
size of our circle to increase. One day we were attending the prayers at a
great mosque. It was the feast of Ashura, the twelfth of Muharram. We were just
leaving the mosque when our teacher paused on the steps because he noticed that
a pigeon had just dropped dead from the sky. He picked up the poor bird, which
was totally lifeless, held it tenderly in his hand, breated a long
Huuuuuu...and the bird came back to life and flew off into the sky. Well, this
act did not go unnoticed and before long there were many people intersted in
our shaikh. Many of them asked to attend his conversations our circle grew.
It was not long before we found that
we had very little time with our beloved shaikh. He was too busy to see us,
attending to needs of so many people. Then one day,while doing the night prayer
after our zhikr, our shaikh let out a loud and smelly fart. People were
astounded that this holy man could do such a thing. In a short period of time
most of them had lost their faith in him and our circle returned to nearly the
size it had been originally. One night when just the the three of us were
sitting together, our shaikh remarked:”You see my sons, those who come because
of a pigeon, leave because of a fartt!”
