M1:259 — هدیه‌ها می‌داد هر درویش را / تا بیابد نطقِ مرغِ خویش را

Translation: He would give gifts to every dervish, So that he might recover the speech of his own bird. Meaning: Driven by remorse, the greengrocer offered charity to dervishes, hoping this act of atonement would restore the silenced parrot's ability to speak.

In this couplet, Mowlana, through the narrative of the Greengrocer and the Parrot, delves into our human proclivity for understanding and analogy. Here, the greengrocer is consumed by deep regret after his abrupt and violent act of striking the parrot, causing its silence and baldness. This profound remorse drives him to desperate measures to restore his beloved bird's speech. He "gave gifts to every dervish," hoping that through charity and supplication to the spiritually poor, he might find a way to reclaim "the speech of his own bird." The greengrocer's action exemplifies how humans, when confronted with complex effects, sometimes resort to means that are not necessarily direct or logical in their causality, yet they cling to them out of penitence and hope. He endeavors to resolve an internal, emotional issue (the parrot's silence) through an external, benevolent act (giving gifts). This is where Mowlana subtly guides us towards a fundamental misunderstanding: that we often seek a single cause for every effect, failing to acknowledge that a phenomenon can have diverse origins. This beyt is a prelude to the "parrot's faulty analogy" that unfolds later in the story, where the parrot attributes the dervish's baldness to the same cause as its own (spilling oil). The greengrocer himself, in this instance, is caught in a form of causal oversimplification, albeit driven by remorse and good intentions. He believes that by altering his "action" (giving gifts), he can change the parrot's "state." This embodies the "Nothing But" fallacy, where we presume one thing is nothing but another, while the world is replete with multiple causes and unseen pathways.

Key takeaways

• The greengrocer's actions stem from his profound regret over harming the parrot.
• He offers charity and good deeds, hoping to restore the parrot's speech.
• This illustrates the human tendency to seek a remedy, even an indirect one, for a complex problem.
• Mowlana sets the stage for the 'parrot's faulty analogy' (fallacy of reductionism) later in the story.
• The greengrocer's act exemplifies an attempt to solve an internal state (silence) with an external action (charity).