بِسْمِ اللّهِ الرَّحْمـَنِ الرَّحِيمِ
آزَارکَشِی کُن و مَیازَار؛
کآزُرْدَهٔ تُو بِهْ کِه خَلْق بِهآزَار.
Language:
This couplet appears near the end of section 8 of Niẓāmī’s Laylī u Majnūn, titled “در شکایت حسودان و منکران” — “On complaining of the envious and the deniers.” In the received text, Niẓāmī moves through the pain of being opposed, envied, copied, and misrepresented, and then ends not with revenge, but with this rule of restraint. Ganjoor’s text gives the couplet as: “آزار کشی کن و میآزار / کآزرده تو بِه که خلق بهآزار.” (Ganjoor)
Laylī u Majnūn is one of the five long narrative poems of Niẓāmī’s Khamsa. Encyclopaedia Iranica describes it as a narrative poem of about 4,600 lines, composed in 584/1188, and as the third poem in that five-part collection. (Encyclopaedia Iranica)
Brief Explanation:
This couplet is short, but it cuts very deeply. The first word is āzār: hurt, injury, harm. Niẓāmī does not pretend that hurt is unreal. He does not ask the heart to become stone. He says: bear the hurt, but do not become the cause of hurt.
That distinction is the whole teaching.
Many people think that being hurt gives them permission to hurt. They say it with words, with silence, with harsh correction, with public shaming, with a tone that wounds more than the actual sentence. Niẓāmī closes that door. The fact that pain entered you does not give you the right to pass it into someone else.
To my ear, the power of the line is in the movement from آزُرْدَهٔ تُو to خَلْق بِهآزَار. It is better that you carry a wound than that a whole circle of people become wounded through you. The self is asked to become the place where harm stops, not the channel through which it spreads.
This is especially important for the adult entrusted with correction.
Correction is necessary. Children need boundaries. Students need guidance. A younger person sometimes needs to be stopped, redirected, and made responsible for what he has done. But correction is not the same as humiliation. Firmness is not the same as cruelty. Discipline is not the same as the adult releasing his own anger under the name of teaching.
Once correction becomes a way of satisfying our wounded pride, it is no longer guidance. The child is not meeting wisdom anymore. He is meeting our unhealed pain.
Niẓāmī’s line asks the adult to pause at that exact doorway. Am I correcting because this child needs truth? Or am I striking because I feel disrespected? Am I protecting the order of the home or classroom? Or am I protecting my ego? Am I trying to restore goodness? Or am I trying to make the child feel small enough that I can feel large again?
The answer may be uncomfortable. But that discomfort is part of the medicine.
The adult who cannot bear hurt will often become harsh. A child’s defiance, mistake, carelessness, or sharp word touches something raw, and the adult answers from that raw place. But the mature soul does not hand its wound to the child. It holds the wound before God, before conscience, before silence, until the response becomes clean.
That is not passivity. It is moral strength.
There is a form of patience that is cowardice, but this is not that. Niẓāmī is not saying, “Let wrong continue.” He is saying: do not correct wrong by becoming wrong. Do not answer disorder with your own disorder. Do not let the injury done to you become an injury done by you.
A note about the wording:
I have vocalized the final phrase as بِهآزَار — be-āzār, “in hurt” or “in affliction.” In unvocalized copies, this can look close to بازار, but the meaning of the couplet clearly turns on āzār, harm. The two halves mirror each other: آزارکشی and میازار, then آزُرْدَه and بهآزار.
Moral Use:
This is a line to remember before correcting anyone.
Before raising the voice.
Before writing the message.
Before punishing.
Before making an example of someone.
Before speaking in the name of truth while secretly enjoying the sharpness of the truth.
The couplet teaches a simple rule: let the harm stop with me.
That one rule can change a home. It can change a classroom. It can change the way authority feels to those who live under it. A child corrected without humiliation may still feel the weight of his mistake, but he will not have to carry the extra wound of being crushed by the one who was supposed to guide him.
The adult’s task is not merely to stop wrong behavior. It is to preserve the soul while correcting the behavior.
That requires restraint.
And restraint is not a small virtue. It is the difference between correction that heals and correction that leaves another hidden injury in the world.
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