Years ago, I read someone's version of this story in a newsgroup, probably about Islam. That person guessed the story might be from the 1001 Nights, but it doesn't feel like a story Scheherazade would tell. If you recognize it, let me know. I think the only thing you need to know is that it's traditional for a muslim to make a journey at least once in life to Mecca out of devotion to God. The journey is called the Haj.
Because this is not my story, I’m placing this version in the public domain.
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Kasim's Haj
by Will Shetterly
by Will Shetterly
Haroun al-Rashid, caliph of Baghdad, dreamt that he was at the gates of paradise and heard a voice: "What would you like to know, Haroun al-Rashid?"
He wanted to know if he would enter paradise when he died, but it seemed rude to ask for himself. Since he had just made his pilgrimage to Mecca, he asked, "Which of the pilgrims who made the Haj this year will enter paradise?"
"Only one."
"And who is that most favored and deserving one?"
"Kasim of Ismail Street."
The caliph woke. He disguised himself as a man of modest means and went into his city. The hour was early. No one stirred. When he came to Ismail Street, only one window in a tiny shop had its shutters open. By the light of a small lamp, an old man in old clothes was sewing a new sole onto an old shoe. Haroun al-Rashid asked, "Do you know where I would go to find Kasim of Ismail Street?"
The shoemaker said, "Oh, my friend, I am very sorry that I cannot tell you where to go to find a man by that name."
Haroun al-Rashid sighed in disappointment.
The shoemaker added, "The only man I know by that name you have already found."
Haroun al-Rashid stared at him. How could this be? The shoemaker was too old to make the Haj alone and too poor to make the Haj with helpers. Haroun al-Rashid asked, "Did you make the Haj this year?"
"No," said the shoemaker. "I have not had that honor."
"I am sorry to have troubled you," said Haroun al-Rashid, wondering how his dream had sent him so wrong.
"I planned to make the Haj this year," the shoemaker said. "I saved a penny every week for forty years to make the Haj. And I thought I had saved enough coins at last."
"But you hadn't?" Haroun al-Rashid asked.
"Oh, I had," said the shoemaker. "But on the coldest day of winter, my wife said she would like to eat camel meat. We had not eaten anything but water and rice for several weeks, and she was pregnant."
"So you bought so much camel meat you couldn't make the Haj?" Haroun al-Rashid asked.
"Oh, no," said the shoemaker. "I told my wife we could not afford meat. But then our house began filling with the smell of camel stew. The smell came from our neighbor's house. We could not escape it."
"And then you went to buy meat?" asked Haroun al-Rashid.
"Oh, no," said the shoemaker. "My wife said she would die if she did not have a taste of camel stew. She asked me to go to the neighbors and beg them for one bite."
"But instead you went to buy meat of your own?" asked Haroun al-Rashid.
"Oh, no," said the shoemaker. "I went to my neighbor and said that my pregnant wife had not eaten meat in weeks and could he spare a bite for her? He began to cry. He said, 'My friend, you do not smell camel stew. We have not had any food in our house for weeks. To keep my children from starving, I went into the market and bought an old donkey skin for a penny that we are boiling for soup. I am sorry that I have no camel stew for your wife. May God grant her wish soon.' So I went back to my home and dug up the coins I had saved for the Haj and gave them to my neighbor." The shoemaker shrugged. "God willing, someday I might make the Haj."
Haroun al-Rashid nodded. "God willing, someday I might make the Haj, too."
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Afterword: I drive people crazy by moving blog posts around. At one of this post's earlier locations, owlmirror36 left this comment:
A few years ago, you posted this story, and I left some comments on researching where it came from. Since then, you've deleted stuff and re-created it elsewhere several times, and I guess those comments got dropped.
However, since I was interested enough in the topic, I saved a local copy of those comments, and I can once again point to the source as almost certainly being a story from Memorial of the Saints, by Farid al-Din Attar.
The original Arabic title of the collection is transliterated as "Tadhkirat al-Awliya'" or "Tazkara-tul-Auliyah", and is also translated as "Memoirs of Muslim Saints". ¹
There is an English translation of the original titled Muslim Saints and Mystics; Episodes from the Memorial of the Saints
I also found a source for the story from something you posted: While you were renaming/rearranging your blogs/websites for the seventeenth time, I was trying to find a particular comment left on it that had a link to a site that explained the Mayan calendar with respect to the year 2012 (something about baktun 13). In frustration, because I think everything was broken/gone, I went to the web archive [web.archive.org] of shetterly.blogspot.com. I don't think I found what I was looking for there, but I noticed that it had stuff going back to 2003, which as I recall had been lost in the version of that blog that I visited.
The very first archive of the blog has postings from March 2003, and includes what appears to be an e-mail from Rachel Brown. It includes a link to a PDF of Muslim Saints and Mystics ³ in English, which is here:
http://www.omphaloskepsis.com/ebooks/pdf/mussm.pdf
On pages 159-161 is the story of "Abd Allah-e Mobarak and Ali ibn al-Mowaffaq", the latter of whom is the one whose haj was accepted.
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1: Wikipedia has the book as "Tazkirat al-Awliyā", and an additional transliteration of "Tazkerat-ol-Owliya" (also "Tazkirat ul-Awliya" and "Tazkiratul Awliya", &c.), and translates the title as simply "Biographies of the Saints". ²
2: The author's name is in Wikipedia as Attar Neyshapuri, and his full name name was Abū Hamīd bin Abū Bakr Ibrāhīm -- "'Attar" meaning "pharmacist" and "Neyshapur" being where he lived. Farīd ud-Dīn was his pen name, it says there. As I suspected when I first read the story, he was a very prominent Sufi.
3: And the subtitle has yet another transliteration: "Tadhkirat al-Auliya’". I am reminded of the umpteen ways that Shakespeare spelled his own name...