graciously towards me and appoint me as general preacher to all the eastern provinces. So I went there, and the following three matters made me turn down his friendship. But for twenty years I have suffered torments in isolation, and have not interefered in their world.
The First Matter was his showing through his actions that he was the man that a Hadith had predicted would try to harm Islamic traditions at the end of time. I had expounded the Hadith thirty-six years previously and the man turned out to be the person it was referring it. There is an explanation of this in the third part of my court defences.
Second Matter: It is a correct rule that the existence, construction, and life of something is possible through the existence of all the conditions and elements that pertain to it, but its non-existence, destruction, and death occur on the spoiling of a single condition. That destruction is far easier than construction is a proverb on everyone's lips. In consequence of this certain rule, since the serious mistakes and destruction that are there for all to see resulted from that commander's errors, and the great honours and victories resulted from the army's heroism, it is an awesome injustice to ascribe the good of the community to the man at the top and his evil to the community, when it should have been exactly the reverse.
Third Matter: To ascribe the community's good acts and army's victory to the man at the top and his error to the community, means reducing thousands of instances of good to a single good and increasing a single error to thousands. For if a regiment kills a terrible enemy, each of its soldiers receives the rank of ghazi, a champion war veteran, but if it is ascribed only to the colonel, the honour is reduced a thousandfold to there being a single ghazi. And if due to his own error the colonel becomes a bloody murderer but the murder is ascribed not to him but to the regiment, a single crime multiplies a thousand times and a thousand soldiers become answerable and subject to punishment.
Similarly, if the open, serious errors are not ascribed to the deceased man who committed them, by attributing them to an army which for five hundred, indeed a thousand, years has demonstrated its fighting spirit and love of truth to the world and put its signature with its swords and blood to its being the standard-bearer of the noble Qur'an, those errors increase thousands of times over, to the number of its officers; it tarnishes terribly the army's shining past and shames this century's army before those armies of the past, and makes it culpable. And if the present glories and victories are given to a single man, they diminish thousands of times over, and the fighting spirit and virtues to the number of officers and men are reduced to one and are extinguished. Such faults could never be atoned for.