Among the many learned rivals who envied the lessons of Mirza-Schaffy, the most conspicuous was Mirza-Jussuf, the Wise Man of Bagdad.  He named himself after this city, because he had there pursued his studies in Arabic; from which he inferred that he must possess more profound accomplishments than Mirza-Schaffy, whom he told me he considered a “Fschekj,” an ass among the bearers of wisdom.  “The fellow cannot even write decently,” Jussuf informed me of my reverend Mirza, “and he cannot sing at all!  Now I ask thee:  What is knowledge without writing?  What is wisdom without song?  What is Mirza-Schaffy in comparison with me?”

In this way he was continually plying me with perorations of confounding force, wherein he gave especial prominence to the beauty of his name Jussuf, which Moses of old had celebrated, and Hafiz sung of in lovely strains; he exerted all his acuteness to evince to me that a name is not an empty sound, but that the significance attached to a great or beautiful name is inherited in more or less distinction by the latest bearers of this name.  He, Jussuf, for example, was a perfect model of the Jussuf of the land of Egypt, who walked in chastity before Potiphar, and in wisdom before the Lord.

THE SCHOOL OF WISDOM

From the ‘Thousand and One Days in the East’

“Mirza-Schaffy!” I began, when we sat again assembled in the Divan of Wisdom, “what wilt thou say when I tell thee that the wise men of the West consider you as stupid as you do them?”

“What can I do but be amazed at their folly?” he replied.  “What new thing can I learn from them, when they only repeat mine?”

He ordered a fresh chibouk, mused awhile meditatingly before him, bade us get ready the kalemdan (writing-stand), and then began to sing:—­

     “Shall I laughing, shall I weeping
       Go, because men are so brute,
     Always foreign sense repeating,
       And in self-expression mute?

     “No, the Maker’s praise shall rise
       For the foolish generation;
     Else the wisdom of the wise
       Would be lost from observation!”

“Mirza-Schaffy,” said I, interrupting him again, “would it not be a prudent beginning to clothe thy sayings in a Western dress, to the end that they might be a mirror for the foolish, a rule of conduct for the erring, and a source of high enjoyment for our wives and maidens, whose charm is as great as their inclination to wisdom?”

“Women are everywhere wise,” replied my reverend teacher, “and their power is greater than fools imagine.  Their eyes are the original seat of all true devotion and wisdom, and he who inspires from them needs not wait for death to enter upon the joys of Paradise.  The smallest finger of woman overthrows the mightiest edifice of faith, and the youngest maiden mars the oldest institutions of the Church!”