Looking for the Key: A Mulla Nasrudin Tale 'Abdu'l-Bahá Used

The Master, several listeners record, would draw freely on the great folk humour of the Persian and Turkish peoples. Mulla Nasrudin — the absent-minded village judge, half saint and half fool, whose stories run in a thousand variations across the Islamic world — appears in more than one of His conversations.

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One of the stories runs, in essentially the form the Master would tell it, like this. Mulla Nasrudin had lost his key. He was searching for it on his hands and knees in the street under a lamp-post. A neighbour came along and joined the search. After half an hour the neighbour, having patted every inch of the cobblestones, asked, with some weariness, *Are you sure, Mulla, that you dropped the key here?*

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*No,* said the Mulla cheerfully. *I dropped it in the house.*

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*Then why are we looking out here?*

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*Because,* said the Mulla, *the light is much better out here.*

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The Master would tell the story with the small smile of one sharing a familiar joke. The friends, those who knew the tradition, would laugh. Then, often, He would let a quiet observation follow.

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We do this, He would say, with the truth. We look for it where the light is, not where it has fallen. The truth has its own location. It often lies in places of darkness — the dark of the heart, the dark of an honest self-examination, the dark of a question we have been refusing to ask.

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The light of the public street is brighter; the light of intellectual fashion is more abundant; the light of self-flattery is generally well lit. But the truth is not in those places. It is in the dark room where we set the key down some time ago. We must, the Master would suggest, go in.

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The parable was offered, the listeners noted, often to those inquirers who had collected great quantities of opinion without yet having looked into the rooms of their own hearts. He did not rebuke. He simply told the story. The believers carried it away in their notebooks; some of them, in later years, said they had spent the rest of their lives looking, at last, in the right place.

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*Paraphrased from Stories Told by 'Abdu'l-Bahá (Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 2000); see original for full text.*

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