AN INTELLIGENT man, a scholar with a trained mind, came one day to a village. He wanted to compare, as an exercise and a study, the different points of view which might be represented there. He went to the caravanserai and asked for the most truthful inhabitant and also the greatest liar of the village.
The people who were there agreed unanimously that the man called Kazzab was their greatest liar; and that Rastgu was the truthful one. In turn he visited them, asking each a simple question: ‘What is the best way to the next village?’ Rastgu the Truthful said: ‘The mountain path.’ Kazzab the Liar also said: ‘The mountain path.’ Not unnaturally, this puzzled the traveller a great deal. So he asked a few others, ordinary citizens.
Some said: ‘The river;’ others: ‘Across the fields.’ And others again said: ‘The mountain path.’ He took the mountain path, but in addition to the matter of the goal of his journey, the problem of the truthful and the liars of the village troubled him.
When he got to the next village, and related his story at the resthouse, he ended: ‘I evidently made the basic logical mistake of asking the wrong people for the names of the Truthful and the Liar. I arrived here quite easily, by the mountain path.’ A wise man who was present spoke. ‘Logicians, it must be admitted, tend to be blind, and have to ask others to help them. But the matter here is otherwise.
The facts are thus: The river is the easiest route, so the liar suggested the mountain. But the truthful man was not only truthful. He noticed that you had a donkey, which made the journey easy enough. The liar happened to be unobservant of the fact that you had no boat: otherwise he would have suggested the river.’
‘People find the capacities and blessings of the Sufis impossible to believe. But such people are those who have no knowledge of real belief. They believe all kinds of things which are not true, because of habit or because they are told them by people of authority.
‘Real belief is something else. Those who are capable of real belief are those who have experienced a thing. When they have experienced … capacities and blessings merely reported are of no use to them.’ These words, reported of Sayed Shah (Qadiri, who died in 1854) sometimes precede The Mountain Path’.