Maruf the Cobbler

Also known as Maruf Mochi

• 5 minute read
• Ages 9-13
• Alif Laila Stories

Maruf mended shoes in Cairo and earned very little, and what he earned he mostly gave away, which was the root of most of his troubles at home.

One winter night, having had enough, he walked out of the city and kept walking until he could not walk any further, and fell asleep in a ruin.

When he woke he was not in Egypt.

Somewhere else

He had come out somewhere with different air and different trees, and the first person he met was a man from his own street in Cairo who had moved to this city years before and done well.

His friend took him in and asked what he intended to do.

"I have nothing," said Maruf. "I have the clothes I am wearing."

"Then say nothing about that," said the friend. "This is a city where they judge a man by his caravan. Say you are a merchant and that your caravan is on the road behind you, and I will lend you what you need until it comes."

Maruf did not like it. But he was hungry, and he did it.

The merchant who gave everything away

The story ran round the city within a week.

A great merchant had arrived from Egypt with an enormous caravan following him, and while he waited for it he was borrowing against it, and — this was the part people could not get over — he was giving it away.

He gave to beggars. He paid off other men's debts. He bought things and handed them to whoever was standing nearby. Merchants lent him more and more because a man that generous plainly had a great deal coming.

The King heard about him and married him to his daughter, Princess Dunya.

And the caravan did not come.

The confession

It did not come for a long time, and the merchants began to talk, and the King's vizier said what he had been saying from the start, which was that this man was a fraud.

Princess Dunya came to Maruf one night and asked him directly.

And Maruf, who had been dreading it for months, told her the whole truth: the shop in Cairo, the walk, the ruin, the friend, the lie, all of it.

He expected her to call her father.

She sat and thought about it.

"You have given away everything you were lent," she said, "and kept nothing. That is not what a swindler does. A swindler leaves." She gave him her own jewels and a horse. "Go tonight, before my father's vizier moves. When this is settled I will send for you."

The ring

Maruf rode out and was some days away when he stopped at a ruined farm to rest.

Digging idly at a loose flagstone, he found a chamber underneath, and in it a ring.

He rubbed the dust off it, and something stood in the chamber with him and said it was the servant of the ring and would do as he asked.

Maruf sat down on the step for a while.

Then he asked for a caravan.

The caravan arrives

It came into the city seven hundred mules deep, loaded with silk and spices and gold, and it took most of a day to pass the gate.

And Maruf, riding at the head of it, paid every merchant in that city what he owed and then paid them again for the waiting. He paid the ones who had doubted him the same as the ones who had not.

The vizier, who had been right about everything and was now standing in the street watching seven hundred mules go past, never recovered from it.

And Maruf went to Princess Dunya and gave her back her jewels, and told her the ring had done all of it, because he had decided somewhere on the road that he was finished with lying.