Joe: Yeah! I get this one! He means, even if right is on your side, employ every means at your disposal to win-- kind of like Colin Powell and the UN. :-)

A lot of the Sufi tales are what I'd term 'culturally iconoclastic'. They seem to often be trying to get people to take a second look at their base assumptions (memes, for twisterella).

Who but Nasruddin would think of sending a bribe in the other guy's name? That wouldn't even occur to the lawyer. (Or most people.) Note also that our Nasruddin also made sure that the judge would rule against a man who tried to bribe him before sending the bribe. I could find a few other layers too... on honesty and justice...

So Ted Rall is actually working on our side trying to discredit the far left?

Sadly, Ted Rall appears to be serious. So are the Sufis, but in a different way. Fortunately.

Let me throw another curve into this... what could a judge represent?

Kathy K. !! Absolutely-- jokes, parables, songs, slogans, powerful vectors of memetic change! :)

Hmm. This one works on several levels.

I'm groping here, but I read this as an exhortation that doing the right thing, even for ignoble reasons, is still doing the right thing.

For example, the Congress, and its agent, the IRS, often have to "bribe" taxpayers, through the mechanism of tax breaks, to donate to charitable causes. Our internal judges thunder it is morally right and proper to help the less fortunate. Yet our baser selves (the opponent) may need a little incentive. If we send a bribe to the judge in our greedy selves' name (Schedule A deduction), the end result is that we still do good.

I just noticed the story doesn't say what the judge did with the gold after he ruled. If he was an honest judge, like Nasruddin's lawyer claimed, he would have returned the bribe to the other man. I wonder if this is Nasruddin's way to secretly compensate this man for his loss in court? This has shades of Jesus' parable about doing good deeds in secret, without public acclaim.

I find it to be a depressing story. But maybe I'm just looking on it from the wrong "level."

The story doesn't say who is "in the right" with regard to the original litigation, but we can infer it.

Nasruddin uses deception to win the case. Why? If he had faith in his own rightness, he would have had faith in justice. A man who is afraid of justice is a man who knows, at some unconscious level, that he is the party in the wrong. Only a guilty man needs to bribe the judge.

So rather than place himself in the hands of justice, Nasruddin uses deception. In so doing, he arrogantly usurps the rightful moral authority of the court. He also frames a man whom we now know to be innocent.

To top it all off, he speaks about it to his own lawyer in a manner that suggests that he is unconscious of how corrupt he is. It seems that he will walk away from this never really realizing that he has committed three crimes: the original crime for which he was litigating, the crime of usurping justice, and the crime of framing an innocent man. Yet he seems more proud of himself for his cleverness than humiliated by his own crooked behavior.

parallels:
the original litigation = the debate over conservative fiscal policy vs liberal fiscal policy
the judge = the american electorate

I'll let you finish from there.

The story makes no point about who is right or wrong either way, therefore the correct assumption is not that either case is just or not but that it doesn't matter for the purposes of the parable.

Actually reading this I'm reminded of a line a villain used in an anime I saw a while back. 'No matter how right you are, no matter how just your cause, in the face of overwhelming power, all you can do is die.'

Nasruddin has power (money), used it efficiently, and crushed his opponent.

Two points leap out at me here:

1. Morality and strength are entirely separate axis we tend to confuse. Don't. Being strong doesn't make you right or wrong, and vice versa being weak doesn't make you noble or despicable either.

and

2. Morality doesn't confer power. See the quote above.

I think one of the great evils of our time is this obnoxious idea that if enough people just gather together and think happy thoughts suddenly the dictators of the world will retire, hunger, starvation, and disease will go away, crime will end, and we'll all live happily ever after. If only all those evil thoughts would just stop. No need to work for economic or military power, no need to work for anything at all. Just yell at the top of your lungs catchy slogans and think happy thoughts and the world will bow before you. For some reason. Involving aliens apparently. Or maybe pixies. If only the pixies weren't being locked up by the evil zionist stormtroopers and used to write Britany Spears albums...or something like that, haven't check Indymedia yet today.

> [justice] doesn't matter for the purposes of the parable.

I just can't get believe that the blatant corruption, for which even the lawyer in the parable expresses horror, "doesn't matter."

To me, the lesson is: it is so easy to get caught up in your desire to win, and in the cleverness of your stratagems, that you forget the simple question of the morality of your own actions.

And to me, it's a particularly telling parable for our time.

Josh,

I believe you are confusing justice with morality. An action may be just under the law, but if the law itself is immoral, is the action right? Contrarily, what some consider moral may be unjust.

For example, to use your own example of fiscal policy, the law currently allows for Bush's tax cuts. The rich pay less under this law than they would have otherwise. I would argue this is a just result, since they have fulfilled their duty under the law. Many would argue, however, this is an immoral result because the rich are keeping more of their corrupting lucre under this law.

As to the counter-example, we need only look at the current war. The jihadis believe they are acting morally in waging war on infidels. Bombings that result in homicides are patently illegal, at least in California. So the jihadis argue their actions are moral, but their shedding innocent blood is manifestly unjust to my eyes.

Justice requires an external party to adjudicate disputes or crimes with respect to a standard of law, and an external party to enforce those judgments. Morality requires you yourself to resolve conflicts between your desires and the harm they may do to others or yourself, and only you yourself can implement your decisions. The two fields often overlap, but they are not necessarily congruent.

In this case, I believe Nasruddin served both the causes of justice and morality. Justice, since he prevailed under the law, as his own lawyer agrees. Morality, since he creatively compensated the other party for his loss.

Josh, I'm disappointed. Aren't liberals supposed to carry the banner for cultural sensitivity?

Somehow, I don't think a judge represents "the American electorate" to the Sufis. Though the implied parochialism of the comparison is a pretty funny story by itself. No, as usual the themes of the story are far more universal than that. You were on an interesting track before you tripped and brought in politics.

What could a judge represent to a Sufi, and to the culture that gave rise to this story?

> Somehow, I don't think a judge represents "the American electorate" to the Sufis.

Of course not. But to be of any utility to us, the parable has to be mapped in some way to the modern experience.

The judge is clearly a "bit player." The story explores Nasruddin's personality in some detail, and even explores the lawyer's personality a little. In contrast, it says nothing about the personality of the judge other than that he is an honest judge. This makes it clear that the story is interested in Nasruddin's motivations, not the judge's. The judge is nothing more than a plot device, the mechanism of justice.

In the American system, the mechanism of justice would be a trial by an honest jury, or in the case of a policy dispute, an election with a well-informed electorate. The slightly different mechanism doesn't change the essentials of the story: it's like the difference between a laser gun in a sci-fi story and a magic wand in a fantasy story.

I'm curious what your interpretation of the story is? Or were you planning on keeping us in suspense?

Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.

The prophet (PBUH) said: 'Seven (types of) people will be covered with Allah's shade on a day when there is no shade but His Shade, (from among them) a man who gives a charity hiding it, that (even) his left hand does not know what his right hand has spent'.

Is this a reasonable interpretation?

It strikes me as typical of the Semitic culture which seems to value clever trading, and doesn't seem to have the same response to deception as our post-Victorian Western society. That is not meant to denigrate Middle Easterners, since many Westerners think the same way but don't admit it.

It reminds me a lot of the kind of stories I've heard repeatedly during my legal career to the effect that winning is the goal, regardless of the means.

One of the questions that occurred to me was how much gold he paid compared to what his loss of his suit would have cost?

Perhaps the Mullah figured that the judge was not honest in the first place, if he would rule against someone who bribed him regardless of the merits of the case.

What do you do when you have a dishonest judge? Do you present your case honestly relying on the judge to do the right thing, keeping your own integrity, but possibly losing your case? Do you decide that the court is not an arena where honesty and integrity are as important as is commonly assumed?

Maybe the point is that human judges are not divine and you have to deal with them as they are.

Then there's this: what if the opponent had sent the judge some gold as well? This gets into game theory.

If the judge received two bribes ostensibly from the same party, he would be bound to realize that both parties were attempting to influence his judgment wrongly. Would he then decide that they were both equally venal and judge purely on the merits; or would he take greater umbrage at Nasruddin's trickery and rule against him; or would he admire Nasruddin's cunning and favor him?

Not knowing much about Sufi jurisprudence, I'm at a loss to say.

Grim has exactly what I was thinking. That's definitely one of the meanings we can take away from this story.

Once we recall that Sufis work very hard to enter into a direct and mystical relationship with G-d, and consider the concept of "G-d as judge" inherent in all branches of ethical monotheism, the rest falls into place. But adding the quotes from both Jesus and Mohammed was a wonderful plus. Thanks, Grim!

Idries Shah himself also notes that Nasruddin is, of course, the device used here to show how things work, and that he chooses to go with the way things work in order to rethink and remedy a situation. A spiritual teacher may at times need to do something similar, using a student's limitations in order to ensure the breaking of those limitations. Often, those limitations have to do with the student's inbuilt "judging" functions, so there's wordplay here. The Sufis are technicians of breaking such limitations, and Nasruddin has just provided a funny and memorable example of the technique.

Finally, I said "one of the meanings" earlier on because Sufi stories always seem to have several. One can see this tale as a simple joke on the often-pervasive corruption in the story's culture, as a tale of the friction between morality and justice (Q: did Nasruddin transgress morality in order to ensure justice? Or justice to ensure a moral outcome?), as a subtle charity before Allah story, or as a memorable example of an advanced spritual instructon technique.

Which is the "real" meaning? Any or all of them, and listeners will take away the level of meaning most appropriate to their understanding.

Any other suggeestions?

> 'you might even be arrested for attempted bribery!'

I'm curious how these interpretations take this sentence into account. In your vision of the story, does the other party go to jail, or is this a red herring?

If the story is about Allah as the judge, the analogy is obvious and no-one goes to jail on account of the 'bribe' - though one may have worse things happen if the bribe is offered directly in one's own name.

If the story is about spiritual instruction techniques, "arrested" can be taken in a different form (arrested development), and again no-one goes to jail.

Given that Mulla Nasruddin stories in general are not about hurting people, I assume "red herring".