Usbek to the Same.
I CANNOT, divine Mollak, quiet my impatience; I know not how to wait for thy sublime answer: I have doubts which must be satisfied; I perceive that my reason wanders; restore it to the right path; enlighten me, thou source of light; drive away, with thy divine pen, the difficulties I am now going to propose to thee; make me commiserate myself, and even blush at the questions I am about to ask. Why does our legislator restrain us from swine’s flesh, and from all those meats which he calls unclean? Why are we forbidden to touch a corpse? And why, for the purification of our souls, are we commanded continually to wash our bodies? these things appear to me to be, in themselves, neither pure nor impure; for that they should be rendered such by any inherent quality in them, I cannot conceive. Dirt appears filthy to us, only because it is offensive to our sight, or to some other of our senses, yet in itself it is no more so than gold or diamonds. The idea of filthiness contracted by touching a dead body, arises only from a certain repugnance which we have to it. If the bodies of those who do not wash themselves neither offended our smell nor sight, how could we imagine them to be impure? Therefore the senses, divine Mollak, ought to be the only judges of the purity or impurity of things; yet, as the same objects do not affect all men in the same manner, as that which yields an agreeable sensation to some, affords an unpleasant one to others, it follows that the evidence of our senses cannot in this case serve as a rule, unless we allow that each person may, according to his own fancy, determine the point, and distinguish, for what relates to himself, what things are pure or impure. But would not this, divine Mollak, overturn all the distinctions established by our holy prophet, and the fundamental points of that law which was written by the fingers of angels?