Explaining that (ritual) prayer and fasting and all (such) external things are witnesses to the inner light.
شاعر: رومی
وزن: فاعلاتن فاعلاتن فاعلن (رمل مسدس محذوف یا وزن مثنوی)
صنف: مثنوی
This (ritual) prayer and fasting and pilgrimage and holy war are the attestation of the (inward) belief.
The giving of alms and presents and the abandonment of envy are the attestation of one's secret thoughts.
Dishes of food and hospitality are for the purpose of declaring that “we, O noble (guests), have become in true accord with you.”
Gifts and presents and offerings bear witness (saying implicitly), “I am pleased with thee.”
(If) any one exerts himself in (giving) money or in conjuration, what is (the meaning of) it? (He means to say), “I have a jewel within.
I have a jewel, namely, abstinence or generosity”: this alms-giving and fasting are witnesses in regard to both (these qualities).
Fasting says (implicitly), “He has abstained from what is lawful: know (therefore) that he has no connexion with what is unlawful”;
And his alms-giving said (implicitly), “He gives of his own property: how, then, should he steal from the religious?”
If he act as a cutpurse (from self-interest), then the two witnesses are invalidated in the court of Divine justice.
He is a fowler if he scatter grain not from mercy and munificence but in order to catch (the birds).
He is a cat keeping the fast and feigning to be asleep at fast-time for the purpose of (seizing) his ignorant prey.
By this unrighteousness he makes a hundred parties (of people) suspicious, he causes the generous and abstinent to be in ill repute.
(But) notwithstanding that he weaves crookedly, in the end the grace of God will purge him of all this (hypocrisy).
His (God's) mercy takes precedence (over His wrath) and bestows on that treachery (hypocrisy) a light that the full-moon does not possess.
God cleanses his effort of this contamination: the (Divine) Mercy washes him clean of this folly.
In order that His great forgivingness may be made manifest, a helmet (of forgiveness) will cover his (the hypocrite's) baldness.
The water rained from heaven, that it might cleanse the impure of their defilement.
