A certain vizier was going about the country taking petitions, and giving alms, and dealing with what must be dealt with. A poor woman came to him with a petition for alms. He gave her an order for two hundred dinars, which she took to his paymaster. The paymaster, astonished that his master would have ordered so large a sum, took the writing to the Vizier, asking it if was in truth his. The vizier answered that it was. He had intended to write two hundred dirhem, but since it was the will of Allah that he wrote dinar for dirham, gold for silver, the money should be paid out as it was written.

 

Some days later, he received a petition from a poor man, saying that since the Vizier had given his wife two hundred dinars she now considered herself too rich to be married to a poor man like him, and was threatening to force him to divorce her. He asked that the vizier would appoint someone in authority to keep her from doing so.

 

The vizier considered the matter briefly, and then wrote out an order to pay the man two hundred dinar.


(Based on the account in The Table Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge, a translation by D. S. Margoulieth of a book written by al-Muhassin ibn Ali, Tanukhi in the tenth century.)