 In the time of a caliph, a rich man bought a slave whom he treated, from the beginning, like a gentleman, giving him the best of food and clothes, and money exactly like his own child or even more lavishly. But the slave noticed that his master always felt uneasy.
Eventually the rich man made up his mind to set him free and provide him with some capital. One night as they were sitting together, the master said: "Do you know why I have treated you so well?" The slave asked the reason. The master said: "I have one request to make which if you fulfill, you would enjoy all I have given and will give you! But if you refuse, I will be discontented with you." The slave said: "I will obey whatever you ask. You are my benefactor who has given me my life." The master said: "You must promise me in good faith to do it, for I am afraid you may refuse it." The slave said: "I promise to do what you want." The master said: "My proposal is that you must behead me at a specific time and place." The slave exclaimed: "What? How can I do that?" The master said: "That is what I desire." The slave said: "That is impossible." The master said: "I have got your promise. You must do it." One midnight, he awakened the slave and gave him a sharp knife and a bag full of money and climbed up a neighbor's roof, and told the slave to behead him there and then go wherever he liked. The slave asked the reason for such an act. The rich man answered: "I hate this one man and prefer death to seeing his face. We have been rivals but he, my neighbor has gone ahead of me and excels me in everything, and I am burning with hatred. I desire my neighbor to be jailed for this fake murder and this idea is a relief to me. Everyone knows him to be my rival, and so my neighbor will be condemned to death for this act." The slave said: You seem to be a foolish man and deserve this death." So he beheaded the rich man and ran away, His rival neighbor was consequently arrested and imprisoned, but no one believed that he would have killed his rival on his own roof. It had become a mystery. At last, the slave felt a prick of conscience, went to the authorities and confessed the truth. When they understood the matter, they freed both the slave and the neighbor. This is a fact that Hate is a disease of the soul. The Noble Qur'an says in Chapter "The Sun" (Shams 91:9-10). "He will indeed be successful who purifies it, and he will indeed fail who corrupts it." Thus, the first proposal of the Noble Qur'an is purification of the self from ailments, complexes, ignorance, deviations and metamorphoses. You could have heard that in the past there were people who, because of excess of sins, were cursed by the Prophets of their time and were thus metamorphosed, that is, they were transformed into animals such as a monkey, a wolf, a bear etc. Someone said: "We had made a pilgrimage to Makkah along with Imam Sajjad (as) and when we looked down at the Desert of Arafat it was full of Hajis (pilgrims). There were so many of them that year. The Imam Sajjad said: "There is much uproar, but few are true Hajis (pilgrims)." The man says: "I don't know how Imam Sajjad gave me the insight, but when Imam Sajjad asked me to look down again, I saw a desert full of animals, like that in a zoo, among whom a few human beings were moving about." The Imam Sajjad told him how things looked to those who had a clear sight and were concerned with the inward concept of things. | 
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