Usbek to the same

I cannot, divine mullah, calm my impatience ; I cannot bear to await your sublime reply : I have doubts ; they must be settled. I can feel my reason vacillating : bring it back into the straight way [1] ; source of light, come illuminate my way ; strike down with your divine pen the difficulties I am about to put before you. Make me ashamed of myself, make me blush at the question I am about to ask. [2]

Why is it that our Legislator [3] prohibits us the flesh of swine and of all meats he calls unclean ? [4] Why is it that he forbids us to touch a dead body, and that to purify our souls he commands us constantly to wash our bodies ? It seems to me that things in themselves are neither pure nor impure [5] ; I cannot conceive any quality inherent in the subject that can make them so. Mud seems dirty to us only because it offends our sight or another of our senses, but in itself it is not more so than gold and diamonds. The idea of uncleanness contracted by contact with a carcase occurred to us only because of a certain natural repugnance it gives us. If the bodies of those who do not wash offended neither smell nor sight, how could anyone have imagined that they were impure ?

The senses, divine mullah, therefore must be the sole judges of the purity or impurity of things ; but inasmuch as objects do not affect men in the same way, inasmuch as what causes an agreeable sensation to some, produces a repulsive one in others, it follows that the evidence of the senses cannot serve as our rule unless we were to say that everyone may decide this point as he will, and discern, with respect to himself, pure things from those that are impure.

But would not that itself, holy mullah, reverse the distinctions established by our divine Prophet, and the fundamental points of the Law which was writ by the hand of angels ?

Erzerum this 20^th day of the moon of Gemmadi II, 1711 [6]