One summer night, the Sultan went out to stroll through the city after feeling some sudden distress. He shouted at one of his guards to bring his chief to go out on a tour with him. This Sultan was accustomed to strolling through the city from time to time in disguise. As soon as his guard chief met him, the Sultan began, saying, “Come, let’s go out for a walk; I feel distressed.” His guard chief agreed and went out with him, strolling among the city streets.
During their stroll, the Sultan noticed something strange. The Sultan had reached the outskirts of the city and saw a man who had collapsed in the middle of the road. People around him were moving and walking around him without blinking an eye for them, or helping any of them raise him. The Sultan approached him and found the man dead! The Sultan was greatly astonished by the people’s reaction. How could they leave a dead man in this way without anyone thinking of washing him, shrouding him, and respecting him with burial as befits God’s creation?
The Sultan shouted, and people gathered around him without knowing that he was their Sultan. He asked them with intense anger and sadness, “Who is this man? How did you leave him dead like this on the roadside without any of you thinking of carrying him and burying him?” One of them answered him and said, “This man is a heretic.
He used to drink wine and commit adultery.” The Sultan said to him, “Is this man not from the nation of Muhammad, peace be upon him?” They answered him yes. The Sultan asked them to help him carry him to his house. When they entered him to his wife, behold, she was weeping for him intensely.
The Sultan and the guard chief remained inside the deceased man’s house, sitting with his grieving wife after everyone had left. The Sultan noticed that the man’s wife repeated nothing but “I bear witness that you were among the righteous.” The Sultan was greatly astonished and wondered at her saying, so he asked her about her deceased husband. He said to her, “How do you say he was among the righteous when people say he was a wine drinker and committed adultery?” This caused their lack of concern for his death and left him on the roadside without anyone thinking of carrying him to his house. Even when I asked them to do so, they helped me until we brought him here.
The wife answered the Sultan and said to him, “My husband was a righteous man who feared God and His Messenger. He would go every night to the tavern, buy from it whatever wines he could until he emptied the place, bring them to the house, and we would empty them together in the toilet. He would praise God, the Exalted, and say, ‘I am relieving the Muslims.’ Then he would go to the courtesans and give each of them an amount of money, saying to her, ‘This night is from me; close your door upon yourself.’ He would return praising God and say, ‘I have relieved her and the Muslim youth.’
People used to watch and see only what happened from the outside. To them, he would go every night to buy wines and knock on the courtesans’ doors in the middle of the night. So they would speak of him with their bad suspicions without trying to understand what was happening. The woman straightened up and said to the Sultan, “When I said to my husband that people were speaking about him in bad terms.
He said to me, ‘Do not fear. The Sultan of the Muslims, the scholars, and the saints will pray for me.’” The Sultan said to her in wonder, glorifying God, “By God, your husband spoke the truth. I am the Sultan, and tomorrow we will wash him, bury him, and pray over him.” Indeed, on the next day, the Sultan prayed over him, and the great sheikhs and scholars attended the funeral.