The Thief and the Saint: A Story of Sudden Conversion

Among the conversion stories that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá would tell, the listeners record one drawn from the older Persian Sufi tradition — the kind of story He would offer when an inquirer asked Him whether a hardened man could really be changed.

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A thief, the Master would say, had heard that a certain holy man kept a small treasure in his upper room. The thief made his plans. One night he climbed quietly onto the roof, intending to descend through the inner stair when the household was asleep.

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The holy man was at his prayers. The thief, listening from the roof in the warm night, heard the prayers and waited. They went on a long time. Eventually they ended; the holy man rose; the thief expected him to retire. Instead, the recorders preserve, the holy man came up onto the roof himself for the cool air. The thief was discovered.

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The thief expected at once to be denounced. The holy man, however, looked at him without alarm and asked, gently, whether he had eaten. The thief said no. The holy man brought up bread, cheese, and a cup of water, and sat on the roof beside the thief while he ate. He did not ask why the thief had come. He did not ask anything. He simply made the conversation an ordinary one — about the warm night, the moon, the prospect of the harvest in the village below.

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When the thief had finished his bread, the holy man bid him goodnight and went down. He left the door of the upper room open. The thief did not enter. He sat on the roof until dawn. At first light he climbed down and walked into the village; and the recorders preserve that he did not steal again.

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The Master would close the story with a quiet observation. The heart, He would say, is moved more by mercy than by argument. The holy man had not preached. He had not threatened. He had simply set bread before a hungry man and refused to ask for the account the thief had brought himself to render. That refusal, the Master would observe, was the spiritual operation that turned the thief. The thief had encountered a love that asked nothing of him; and in the silence of that love, his own intention to take had collapsed.

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The friends who heard the story understood that the Master was describing not only an old Sufi tale but a working method. He Himself, in His own ministry, met those who came to Him in hostile intent with the same hospitality. Many of them, the recorders note, came down from the roof of His house at dawn the way the thief had come down: emptied of their original plan, full of an unanticipated love.

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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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