AL-HALLAJ
 |    |
Herbert W. Mason
LONDON
AND NEW YORK
Transferred to Digital Printing 2007
1995 Herbert W. Mason
Typeset in Baskerville by Excel Books, New Delhi
CONTENTS
Foreword ix
I.
The Facts of his Life and Theme
of Disappearance 1
II.
The Resurfacing of his Life and its
Repeated Impact 35
III.
The Problem of Universalism 53
IV.
The Question of Uniqueness 63
V.
Reprise: Who was Hallaj and what
is his Place in Islamic Mysticism? 75
Name Index 103
Index of Terms 105
Also by Herbert Mason
Poetry
The Death of al-Hallaj, a Dramatic Narrative
Gilgamesh, a Verse Narrative
A Legend of Alexander and The Merchant and
the Parrot, two Dramatic Poems
Fiction
Gilpins Point, a novella
Summer Light, a novel
Memoir
Memoir of a Friend : Louis Massignon
Moments in Passage
Studies and Translations
The Passion of al-Hallaj by Louis
Massignon, (4 vols)
Hallaj, Martyr and Mystic by Louis
Massignon, 1 vol. abridgement
Testimonies and Reflections
Two Statesmen of Mediaeval Islam
Reflections on the Middle East Crisis
For my friends and colleagues, especially
“You know and are not known, You see and are not
seen.”
-Akhbâr al-Hallâj, no. 44, 1.4
This is that mysticism in which one is decentered before
the unknowable whom one cannot know or imagine or liken anything to : an
absolute imageless other who is best likened to nothing in order to preserve
one’s purity of faith in what one insists is an actual, conscious, deliberate
and involving yet transcendent presence. This presence exceeds the collectivity
of human presences and faculties for knowing and doing and yet is intimate with
it and indeed distinguishes each member from each even as he, traditionally He,
perceives and actively involves the whole in His own unknowable reality which
is meant to be each one’s only center. Is this literally blind faith or
delusion of the most extreme sort imaginable? Is this scientia intuitiva
of the highest order imaginable?
This third/tenth century mystic in the Islamic monotheistic
tradition who was nurtured from childhood by the Qur’an and its cited prophets,
including Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus, who studied the sects and
denominations to understand them and believed them to be “a single unique
principle with numerous expressions,” (Dîwân, M.L., 1.1) was taken very
seriously in his own time to the point of gathering both disciples and enemies
throughout the Islamic world and of being regarded as a political threat to the
state and being executed in 922 AD for the charge of heresy; and thereafter
regarded as a threat to Muslim orthodoxy (Ibn Taymiya, d. 1328 AD;) or as a
supreme lover of God (Rûmî, d. 1273 AD;).
Though an ecstatic mystic as the accounts (akhbâr)
by his contemporaries and his extant poetry and prose indicate, he engaged
himself in the most conventional rites of his faith and approached the failings
of authorities who abused their positions of power with the highest moral
perceptiveness and integrity, and saw the sources of society’s evils with
clarity as being rooted in human greed and betrayal of religious and humanitarian
ideals. All of his rational, critical perceptions were based on the same blind
faith in which his God was his entire hearing and his sight, his thought and
very breath (Dîwân, Q.I).
If it was to nothing he prayed and with nothing he
conversed, his life of delusion was a human tragedy of the highest, most
terrifying order, in which we who view it from afar through texts and our sense
of dramatic verisimilitude share in the terror and yearn with him for the grasp
of that ultimate reality that would give his and, with him, our life meaning.
He died willingly, to our disbelief and further terror, even joyously, to the
point of dancing in his chains as he was led from prison along the Baghdad
esplanade to his shocking dismemberment and execution. His story is one of
unhinging human self-assurance and spiritual selflessness, one of simplicity
unattainable to most of us, in witness of this similitude of nothingness. It
remains an awesome mystery and guide across the ages to those who would pursue
the truth of our human existence to its deepest and most exacting unfathomable
source.
Our current knowledge of this mystic, Husayn ibn Mansûr, of
Persian origin, Arabic speaking and writing, born in a village of southwestern
Iran in 858 AD, educated in the traditionalist Qur’anic schools of his region
and in mysticism and philosophical inquiry in the schools of each developed in
Khurasan and in the capital city of Baghdad in the century of his birth, is due
largely to the devotion and painstaking research of the late French Islamicist
Professeur Louis Massignon (d. 1962) of the Collège de France. Massignon did
the pioneering work of collecting, verifying, editing, translating, and
analyzing the primary texts, eyewitness accounts, subsequent commentaries on
the works and life by Muslims and others down to and including his own time.
His work has been criticized, praised, amended, and ideologically disapproved
of by several scholars, including former students and others influenced
directly or indirectly by his methodology and insights. Notable among the not
uncritical continuers of research on Hallaj and other mystics of his time and
subsequent to it are Roger Arnaldez, Louis Gardet, Paul Nwyia, Annemarie Schimmel,
and Kamil M. ash-Shaibi to name a few among those whose works are listed in the
Bibliography of this book. Massignon’s magisterial study of the life,
teaching, and legacy of the mystic, La Passion d’al-Hallâj, was expanded
from two volumes in its 1922 Paris edition to four in its posthumous 1975 Paris
edition, and is available in English translation through Princeton University
Press, 1983, and in abridged form through the same publisher, 1994. Further,
his important methodological study of the language of Islamic mysticism, in
Paris editions of 1922, 1935, and 1954, has been updated and translated through
Notre Dame University Press, 1995. Finally, his shorter seminal studies of
Hallaj and Muslim mysticism have been collected and published in three volumes
of his Opera Minora listed here in the Bibliography.
The textual basis for the present volume consists primarily
of the Akhbâr al-Hallâj, 3rd edition of Paul Kraus and Louis Massignon,
selected poetry from the Dîwân al-Hallâj, and the prose Kitâb
at-Tawâsîn of Hallaj, the latter available in English translation in full,
volume 3 of the Princeton edition. Drawn upon also are numerous other early,
precursory and sub-sequent texts of Islamic mysticism, in Arabic and Persian
especially, along with commentaries, updates and revisions by more recent
Muslim and non-Muslim scholars.
To this is added cautiously the acquaintance with Islamic
history, literature and tradition derived from over thirty years of studying
and teaching aspects and dimensions of the civilization to which Hallaj
belonged and which in his mind his martyrdom reaffirmed.
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“He will be veiled to my glances until my body
disappears
(talâsha) in the lights of His Essence (anwâri thâtîhî)-, and
then no trace, no mark, no aspect and no memory of me
will remain.”
- Akhbâr, no. 10
THE FACTS OF HIS LIFE AND THEME OF
DISAPPEARANCE
The facts of his life are this: he was born Husayn ibn
Mansûn of Persian parents ca. 244 AH/858 AD in the village of Tur, district of
Bayda in the Arabicized province of Fars in south-western Iran. His father, a
wool carder (hallâj), a profession practised intermittently by his son, followed
his trade through such textile centers as Ahwaz and
1. His first
name, al-Husayn, was given by his father Mansûr, a convert to Islam, his
grandfather, Mahammâ, who remained a Zoroastrian, and a surname, Abû ‘Abdallâh,
completed his names, added to which were those of his place of origin and main
residence and of course in his case notable soubriqet; thus, he was Abû
‘Abdallâh al- Husayn ibn Mansûr ibn Mahammâ al- Baydâwî al-Baghdâdî al-Hallâj. The
Ta’ñkh Baghdâd source for this and other facts will be listed in the
bibliography.
Tustar, settling his family eventually in the traditionalist
Sunnite Arab town of Wasit in southern Iraq ca. 255/868. In 260/873, having
completed his basic education in the Hanbalite Qur'anic school of that fervent
center, the young Hallaj returned alone to Tustar, where he became a disciple
of a celebrated Sunnite Qur’anic scholar and mystic named Sahl, whose approach
to the primary source of his Muslim faith was decidedly and decisively for the
young apprentice more esoteric and interiorizing than had been the instruction
by memorization and exoteric commentary in Wasit. Sahl’s path harkened back to
and extended the intense detachment from the world of the earliest ascetics of
Islam, notably to the Islamic first century’s Hasan of Basra, the willfully
dark and mournful Persian precursor and indeed spiritual progenitor named in
most later mystics’ chains of mystical authority (isnâd). He remained
with Sahl for approximately two years, after which he made his way westward
once again to Iraq, this time to Basra in the far south where he made his
profession of Sufism and received the Sufi habit, implying commitment to a
common rule of life and a carefully prescribed and historically authenticated
path.
Basra at the time was a center for the diffusion of the
Sufi movement, the principal distinct but corresponding schools having grown up
in Khurasan in northeastern Iran and in the capital city of Baghdad, where the
mystic Muhâsibî (d. 243/857) had moved from Basra with his followers to form
that major center whose most eminent shaykh would be Junayd (d. 298/910). In
Basra Hallaj came under the direct influence of one close to Junayd, ‘Amr
Makkî. (d. 297/909)
In 264/877 he married there the daughter of Abû Ya‘qûb
Aqta‘, a secretary of Junayd and fellow Sufi of ‘Amr Makkî. Of this, his only
marriage, there would be three sons and a daughter. One of these sons, Hamd,
left an account of his father’s later life and martyrdom. According to this account
a quarrel between the two Sufis over the marriage, of which ‘Amr Makkî
disapproved, led Hallaj to journey north to Baghdad to consult Junayd.
Evidence of such spiritual jealousy and possessiveness
accompanied Hallaj throughout his life and grew from excessive attachment to
him by his masters and, later, disciples, exacerbating any eventual doctrinal
differences that arose. Junayd, the recognized leader of the schools of Iraq,
advised the cultivation of patience in the spiritual tradition of Hasan of
Basra, and Hallaj returned to his life in the home of his father-in-law in
Basra.
This town, built originally as a frontier garrison outpost
during the rapid expansion period of Islam into Mesopotamia and Iran, following
the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 11/632, had become an Arab literary center
in the Umayyad period. It was in this post-classical period, that is, between
the death of the last of the so-called Rightly Guided Caliphal successors,
‘Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law in 41/661, and the emergence of the ‘Abbasid
dynasty and its successful revolt in 133/750, that the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd
al-Malik from his capital in Damascus had defined the conquered regions of
Mesopotamia and Iran to the Oxus River in eastern Khurasan as “Al- ‘Iraq”, the
two Iraqs, western and eastern, and put them under the governing control of his
leading military commander Hajjâj, a near legendary figure of early Islam. This
man of cultural grandeur and iron rule commanding first from the garrison
towns of Basra and Kufa and eventually building as governor his own capital of
Wasit, midway between the two, created an atmosphere through his ostentatious patronage
conducive to a flowering of Arabic philological studies and authoritative
Qur’anic recitation. Among later Sufis he was remembered most for his failed
attempt to compete personally in both “sciences” with the ascetic Hasan of
Basra, whom he invited to his palace in Wasit in order to discredit. This was
incidentally one of the first confrontations in Islam between a state and a
purely spiritual leader over the issue of authority argued as it was on the
Basra had become in the third Islamic century a center also
of social crisis, prompted by the revolt of black slaves, the Zanj, imported
from the Sudan and East Africa to dig in the salt mines of lower Iraq. As a
result of gross mistreatment by the ‘Abbasid Sunnite masters ruling from
Baghdad and aroused by opposition from Shi'ite propagandists using the issue
to undermine the authority of the dynasty’s central government, the banner was
raised as an outcry for justice in a religious community that professed
equality among all members. It was a classic confrontation between the major
sectarian divisions also derived from early Islamic history; and Hallaj found
himself in
the middle of the crisis through his Shi‘ite in-laws, the
Karnabâ’î family, who supported the revolt ideologically.
Hallaj, a Sunnite of a strong traditionalist formation,
found himself in a Shi'ite milieu, one that had been deeply imbued with
Hellenistic and neo-gnostic cultural attitudes and thought throughout the
century of his birth, the century that saw the founding of the famous Bayt
al-hikma translation center in Baghdad for the dissemination of Greek
learning and ideas under the patronage of the quasi-Shi‘ite,
anti-traditionalist Caliph al- Ma’mûn. Most important for Hallaj and other
traditionalist Sufis would be the influence of a philosophical vocabulary and a
dialectic mode upon their Sunnite response to Shi'ite propaganda. His aroused
level of dialogue, both on the subject of justice and on the defense of
Qur’anic based Islam, was determined in this intense period. Furthermore, his
exposure to other religious perspectives and traditions, long a Shi'ite
predisposition formed through its concerted intellectual, political, and
cultural opposition to Sunnite “orthodoxy”, left the apparent imprint of
eclecticism upon him and gave rise later among certain of his Sunnite enemies
to accusations of his being a Shi'ite or even a Christian in disguise. His
identification with the awaited Shi'ite Mahdi by certain of his later
devotees also led his early Shi‘ite supporters to eventually accuse him of
falsehood and assumption of religious prophethood belonging to them. In sum, it
was a period that exposed his character to the dangers of spiritual
sectarianism, long a feature of Islamic history, and something Hasan of Basra
had descried for his Community; and now it helped set the stage for Hallaj’s
martyrdom, which in his passion for justice and unity of all Muslims under God
he appeared to invite.
The Zanj revolt failed in 270/883 and the ‘Abbasid Caliph
Muwaffaq firmly in power in the capital reestablished control over Basra and
the southern region of Iraq. Hallaj soon after made the first of his three
extended pilgrimages to Mecca, this on the ‘Umra or minor pilgrimage
performable at any time of the year, in this instance remaining there for the
duration of one year, during which he was said to fast continuously in
preparation for a higher ascetical calling. Like Hasan of Basra and many
subsequent Sufis he saw the purification of his own heart as prerequisite for
the realization of any moral and spiritual vocation on behalf of his Community.
It was most probably this youthful experience that strengthened his conviction
of the meaning of the sayha bi’l-Haqq, the outcry of justice as witness
of the true Reality of God and the Truth of God’s transcendent Uniqueness.
After it he appears to have become confirmed in his opposition to political
extremism and tyranny of any coloration as well as to quietistic Sufism of the
sort he ascribed, rightly or wrongly, to his masters, including Junayd, who in
his mind represented detachment and withdrawel in prayer from any engagement in
political activity. This rejection of quietism separated him thus from the
traditional ascetical stance defined originally by Hasan of Basra, who had
preached patient endurance in the face of tyranny and the cultivation of fear
and sorrow (khawf wa huzn); fear in anticipation of God’s Judgement and
the world to come, and sorrow over our and others’ sins in the world in which
we find ourselves now.
It was roughly around this period that he engaged in discussions
with three notable Sufis that clarified these positions as well as his developing
position on personal inspiration from God (ilhâm}\ in Mecca with ‘Amr
Makkî; in Kufa with Ibrâhîm Khawwâs; and in Baghdad with Junayd. Hamd, in his
biographical account, mentions a meeting at this time between his father and
Junayd with a group of Sufis (fuqarâ ’) in which a question was posed
concerning “the desire for a personal mission (mudda/i)” and about which
Junayd advised patience and calm to the obviously agitated youth. Other
sources place this meeting at the time of the marriage crisis during their
first and possibly, in fact, their only encounter. What matters from all this
is his divergence from traditional Sufism as maintained by the Baghdad school.
In Basra, however, to which he returned to rejoin his wife following his pious
retreat in Mecca, he attracted a number of disciples and commenced his
“personal mission”.
A year later, his father-in-law renounced him and his
positions, and Hallaj left Basra for Tustar with his wife and his
brother-in-law, a Karnabâ’î Shi'ite associate, where he preached (in Arabic, as
he spoke no Persian) to Arabicized audiences with considerable success. He
continued to be attacked in letters sent from Basra by his former master ‘Amr
Makki which were instrumental in making him forego for himself any further ties
with Sufi masters and the garb of Sufism itself, though this garb remained one
of his many “costumes” during his travels on occasion and, later, in prison in
Baghdad.
Once returned to his familiar Islamized and Arabicized
Iranian cultural milieu, around the centers of Tustar and Ahwaz, he became a
visitor in the circles of landed gentry, upper echelon bureaucrats, and
well-to-do patrons, the so-called abnâ’ ad-dunyâ, who had provided the
pre-Islamic Persian Sasanian Empire with the same monied exploitive
functionaries and cultured scribes, now largely Shi'ite but who still
represented an eclectic mix of religious backgrounds and influences, including
Nestorian Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian and, by the end of the 4th/10th
century, quasiBuddhist. It was in this atmosphere especially, and among its
sympathizers in Baghdad and elsewhere, that support for speculative thought and
experimental research was cultivated, particularly in science, philosophy,
alchemy, medicine, and literary anthologizing and criticism. Traditionalist
Muslim piety and asceticism became interiorized and weakened in such centers.
Though Hallaj was recognized and indulged as a popular
itinerant preacher (wâ‘iz) with a mission, his language continued to
become more abstract and dialectical in the mode of these nontraditionalist
(Mu‘tazilite and Shi‘ite) proponents of philosophy (fais a fa) in the
patronized circles of the region.
Around 274/887, in his 30th year, he was arrested by
Sunnite government agents and publicly whipped in Nahiyat al-Jabal, between
Sus in Iran and Wasit in Iraq, probably a victim of mistaken identity as a
political agitator, an agent of the Qarmathians, that radical left wing Shi‘ite
group bent explicitly on the overthrow of the ‘Abbasid government and its
supporters whom the latter suspected everyone critical of themselves to
secretly be. There was a possibility, though no proof, of some moderate Shi'ite
complicity sus-
preach; but this too gave way eventually to accusations of
heresy. In fact, there was only one realm where the implications of his
preaching of the period and afterwards could and did prove dangerous, the
political, in which he himself no longer actively participated, after the Zanj
revolt was quelled. But, then, religion and politics were separable only in the
most ascetical of mystics’ minds in the Community of Islam.
Throughout the five years that followed he traveled on his
“mission” through the Arabicized centers of western Iran and Khurasan as far as
the Oxus River, returning to his birthplace in Fars province where he settled
for a time to write. In 280/893 he joined his wife in Ahwaz, where his third
son Hamd was born toward the end of that year. It was there that he received
the appellation al-Hallâj al-asrâr or al-qulûb, the carder or
reader of the inner secrets of hearts, and where tales began to circulate
regarding his performing of miracles, for which he stirred up accusations of
charlatanism from both Mu‘tazilites and Shi‘ites, all of which gained him much
notoriety and a wider' following.
The traditional Sufi virtue of prudence was no more
achievable by Hallaj than had been that of patience; and it is possible to
imagine his character, albeit not stated literally as such, as drawn in this
period of public celebrity even as his interior
The Facts of His Life and Theme of Disappearance 13 life
deepened to a steadily profounder sense of private communion with God. This
apparent contradiction or at least unsettling juxta-position was a source of
anguish reflected on many levels in his poetry, especially when confusion had
removed his center:
“I have tried to be patient, but how can my heart be
patient when its center is gone?
Your Spirit mixed with my Spirit little by little, by
turns, through reunions and abandons.
And now I am Yourself, Your existence is my own, and it is
also my will.
You have ruled my heart, and I have wandered into every
wadi.
My heart is closed, I have lost all sleep,
I am exiled, alone; how long will my solitude last?” (Dîwân
M. XV and XVI)
The risk of connecting his poetry with his biography is
great, of course, since he seldom if ever refers in his surviving works to
events in his life, except for his anticipated martyrdom. Further, since most
of his writings, along with those of his followers, were burned after his
death, and those that survived did so in later histories or in the dîwâns
of others or in carefully preserved eyewitness accounts and were not correctly
reascribed for decades and, in some cases, not until our own time, the risk is
multiplied. Nevertheless, the citation of his most experiential,
personal poetry to illustrate his range of inner states,
rather than outer events, seems appropriate and beneficial to the composition
of an inner portrait. In all of his poetry “the center” is God and the
experience realized in his words is the perilous embrace of God, which he makes
clear transcends history and himself and in which his self at any moment and
ultimately disappears. This therefore makes any suggested chronology secondary
to his portrait.
Still, in 281/894 he made his second pilgrimage to Mecca
via Basra and the Persian Gulf centers of Qarmathianism. He arrived at the Holy
City, it was said, with four hundred disciples all dressed in rags and patches
of the voluntary poor. He was accused this time by local Sufis of being
possessed by jinn.
The following year he returned to Ahwaz and, after a brief
stay in Tustar, he left the region for good with his wife and family and
disciples, settling them in the already established Tustari textile quarter of
Baghdad. He remained for a year in the capital city, during which he resumed
contact with Sufis, especially with the more individualistic Nuri (d. 295/907)
and Shibli (d. 334/ 945), the latter a Turk who had been a deputy of Caliph
Muwaffaq and who retained connections with the powerful, but who would become a
disciple and friend. He thereafter traveled by sea to India accompanied by an
envoy of the then Caliph Mu‘tadid.
This marked the beginning of his second long 5-year journey
in which his “mission” was intended to preach to Turkish infidels beyond the
Oxus and to populations of western India who had been barely converted to Islam
by radical Shi'ite missionaries. It was during this period that he made
contact with notables of the ruling Samanid dynasty of Khurasan who would
remain loyal to him against their allied and fellow-Sunnite ‘Abbasid overlords
of Baghdad at the time of his martyrdom in 309/922. He preached against
Manichean dualism (zandaqd) among the Uyghur Turks and others beyond the
Dâr al-Islâm, a heresy of which he himself would erroneously be accused
at his trial. The spiritual balance in the world divided between forces of good
and forces of evil could be struck, he preached, by means of self-sacrificing
saints, the abdâl inter-cessors, who witness at the frontiers of true
belief (ahi al-thughûr wa’l-ribâtât) so as to manifest love of God alone
against temptations of evil.
His emphasis was focussed on the cultivation of the
spiritual state of love (mahabbd) leading through desire to union with
God’s essence ( ‘ishq dhâtî), extending the teaching of such earlier
mystics as Râbi'a and Muhâsibî as well as the elder Nûrî, to mention only a
few.
Following his return to Baghdad, ca. 290-1/ 902-3, the
emergence of opposition became more critical, reaching a higher level of
seriousness in the person of a leading Zahirite expert in canon
law and a sophisticated neo-Plationist writer on the
subject of love, M. Ibn Dâwûd (d. 296/908), who initiated a legal denuciation
against him (his Fatwâ bi takfir al-Hallâj), which was proposed to
Caliph Mu‘tadid himself. It was thwarted by another distinguished canonist, the
Shafi‘ite Ibn Surayj (d. 305/917), who issued a disclaimer (Fatwâ bi
tawaqquf...hâl al-Hallâj) stating that mystical inspiration (ilhâm),
the long-standing issue associated with Hallaj and other of the so- called
“ecstatic love mystics” in the minds of experts on the allowable and forbidden
in religious law, was beyond the competence and jurisdiction of canon law.
Thus spared an official inquest, Hallaj undertook his
third pilgrimage to Mecca, this lasting for two years of pious retreat, with
continued meditation on the Qur’an, strict worship, purification of heart,
leading, in his case, to reception of the gift of ecstatic speech (shath)
in which the mystic pilgrim, stripped to the truth of his barest self, becomes
the instrument of God’s uttered word.
This is the final preparation of “the present witness” (shâhid
ânî) of eternal love, which Hallaj’s disciples believed him to be as
confirmed by the sign of his extreme and prolonged piety and observance of the
fundamental rituals of his Muslim faith. Included in his testimony was his
expression, at ‘Arafat, of his readiness to become
The Facts of His Life and Theme of Disappearance 17 a
powerless victim, to suffer condemnation and death like Jesus, for the
purification of his Community. He even beseeched God to let him die accursed by
and for his brutalized, divided and decadent Islamic Community, even to become kâfir,
an infidel, in order to be put to death, if necessary, “in the confession of
the Cross,” to arouse and unite all its members against him, and to effectively
“disappear” in every aspect of himself through “Your love.”
He left the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for the last
time, returning to Baghdad via Jerusalem, which he reached on Holy Saturday
293/905. Resuming his life among his family, friends and followers in the
Tustari quarter of the capital, he built a miniature Ka‘ba, in which he
celebrated symbolically and in private the ta‘rîf and the ritual feasts
of the Meccan pilgrimage. For this symbolic representation and his pronouncement
that it was permitted to substitute it for the pilgrimage itself if one was
unable for financial or health reasons to visit the Holy City according to the
legal prescription, he was accused by his enemies then and at his eventual
trial of preaching the overthrow of Islamic law. And this, despite the fact
that there had been several historic precedents for such substitution, even by
a caliph who had built a symbolic Ka‘ba for his Turkish mercenaries at Samarra
in the 830s. Also, in this period
Hallaj’s preaching became more vehement and focussed
precisely on his desire for martyrdom: in the name of the Sacred Law of Islam
and for the common good.
He stirred again the opposition between canonists Ibn Dâwûd
and Ibn Surayj over his case, as well as the support of a number of disciples
in Samanid Khurasan and in Baghdad, including vizirs and other leaders of state
and the young new Caliph Muqtadir’s mother, the Greek Shaghab, a devoted
disciple. Many of the latter saw in him an inspired and awaited leader called
to reform the Community and its leaders to recognize and practise its revealed
tenets of faith and personal and social values prescribed in the Qur’an. A
remarkably large cross-section of notables and ordinary people looked to him
for spiritual guidance, which placed him further in jeopardy as a threat to
the then established political order and entrenched network of self-interests,
especially illicit banking and speculation interests, operating counter to
Islamic teaching throughout the empire. The Hallaj of this period had been
foreseen in the Hallaj of the era of the Zanj revolt, only the conditions of
corruption, greed, and oppression of the weak by those in power had greatly
worsened and the Caliphate itself had fallen prey to unscrupulous bureaucrats,
gold, silver and wheat speculators, and cruel taxfarmers, both
On the support side, there was an extreme traditionalist
Hanbalite Sunnite movement formed ca. 296/908 with expectation of removing the
infant Muqtadir and his corrupt entourage of court advisers and replacing him
with a rival caliph, Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, and with Hallaj as the spiritual adviser
of its chief architect, the Hanbalite Ibn Hamdân. The insurgency failed and
Hallaj’s fate, though seemingly buoyed further by the recurringly powerful
traditionalists, was left decidedly vulnerable to the stronger prevailing
currents of power politics; and Muqtadir’s vizir, a Shi'ite, Ibn al-Furât, put
him under surveillance.
Hallaj himself had not agreed to lead a movement aimed at
temporal success, returning
unofficially to a Sufi position in which a fatâ, a
brother, renounces entirely any such desired end. Within a year, following
subsequent aborted efforts by the Hanbalites, Hallaj’s leading disciples were
rounded up by the Baghdad police and he went into hiding in his homeland, again
in Ahwaz, and later in Sus, a Hanbalite center. In 301/913 Hallaj’s primary
antagonist, Abû Muhammad Hâmid ibn al-‘Abbâs (d. 311/923), the tax-farmer of
Wasit and a palace banker of Caliph Muqtadir, took his place on the stage of
the rising drama. Though a Sunnite trusted by the Sunnite Caliph, he had close
family ties with militant Shi'ites who despised Hallaj for his assumption, in
their minds, of the exclusive role of their awaited Mahdi; and as the
paymaster of a Baghdad military garrison, he was in a powerful position to hunt
down the charlatan, social agitator, heretic, overthrower of the Sacred Law,
possessed by demons, and it was only a matter of time before his police and
allies captured him and led him into Baghdad under close guard.
A rival force, also close to the weak Caliph Muqtadir, led
by his mother, Shaghab, and a new vizir, ‘Alî ibn Tsâ, and one of the State
secretaries, Hamd Qunnâ’î, all declared disciples of Hallaj, were able to
prevent his case from going to a full trial, based on the earlier fatwâ
of Ibn Surayj concerning the limits of the Law’s jurisdiction in
For the next 9 years, 301-308-9/913-921-2, Hallaj was
confined in the palace, in effect under protective custody, by the Grand
Chamberlain Nasr and other supporters, during which time his last works were
written. Principal among these works was his prose Tâ’ Sîn al-Azal, in
which the Devil, Iblis, is presented justifying himself as a pure monotheist,
affirming God’s transcendence by refusing to bow down before His unclean lowly
creature man. This Iblis is thus a higher mystic lover who witnesses the
inaccessibility of God, but who through his extreme intellectualization of God
as Pure Idea is unable to attain that humility necessary to accept the reality
of His creativeness. Iblis, in Hallaj’s subtle monologue, marks the spiritual
boundary of the mystic’s hubris and dares to cross it through his defiant need
of selfjustification in order to attain his full tragic selfperception. It is
an essay, as it were, in the form of fiction, and one profound in its insight
into mysticism and the vagaries of self, and as disturbing as a reading of
religious experience in its culture as St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of
the
SowZand Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor are in theirs.
Each reveals its author as a religious psychologist deeper than any found in
our specialized fields of mysticism or psychology. Iblis, in his way, as a
Shi’ite neo-gnostic manichean, is a negative witness of the Unity of the One
he professes only to love, and to love more purely, more uncompromisingly than
humanity can. To Hallaj he is therefore a teacher of contemplative love, albeit
a tragic figure of fatal self-deception. He is not a grotesque and ugly monster
as in Dante’s more materialistic depiction, nor a brief defiant tragic hero and
ironic witness for liberty as in Milton’s Paradise Lost, nor the ever
manipulative and companionable deceiver of the ageing life-seeking academic
Faust of Goethe’s complex romance. Hallaj’s Satan is an utterly solitary figure
who can bear no companion but God, who aspires to no human quality given by
God, whose message infused subconsciously, as it were, to humans is to believe
that they themselves, because of their lower natures, can never attain God’s
Presence let alone be one with Him, that their true position is one of
separation from God and despairing solitude (infirdd), a most fearful
state that Hallaj wrote often of experientially in his poems of separation and
solitude that followed moments of ecstatic union with his Beloved, those awqât
that confirmed him in his disbelief in the satanic teaching
Toward the end of his protective custody and due to a
series of political vicissitudes that briefly brought the Shi‘ite Ibn al-Furât
back into vizirial power only to be replaced again by the Hallajian Ibn ‘Isâ
but this time in association with the main antagonist, Hâmid, Grand Chamberlain
Nasr built Hallaj a private cell within the palace in which he could receive
visitors but in which he was also more effectively confined. In 308/921 he was
transferred “for about a year” to a prison, in which, according to his son
Hamd’s account, a separate building was erected where he could continue to
receive visitors and from which he was able to pass through an adjoining door
to read to and enjoin other prisoners to renew their faith in God.
When Ibn ‘Isâ and Hâmid finally split over the former’s
inventory of the empire’s budgetary resources, which Hâmid had been unlawfully
draining off for his private use, the former taxfarmer tightened his alliance
with Shi‘ite bankers to engage the increasingly effete and moneyneeding Caliph
in an illegal speculation on stocks of monopolized corn. Ibn ‘Isâ and Nasr were
able
to rally the populist Hanbalites and tradesmen against the
wholesalers and a riot ensued that was largely aimed against the ‘Abbasid
Caliphate for failing to uphold the fiscal and religious laws of Islam, a
traditionalist as well as radical Shi'ite outcry raised on many occasions
throughout Muslim history against presumptive leadership to a position
(Caliph) always subject to questions of legitimacy. Hâmid was removed from
power, but only temporarily. The forces of opposition to critics of unlawfully
exercised power and those of potential popular riot were merely regrouping for
the next occasion.
The next step in the progression toward the inevitable
trial of Hallaj brought together, on the political plane, old enemies become
allies through a common goal. The Greek eunuch Commanderin-chief, Mu’nis
Qushûrî (d. 321/933), once closely allied to the Queen Mother Shaghab as head
of the court harem, and to Grand Chamberlain Nasr, also of Greek origin, who
had elevated him to Commander of field police forces, destined to lead the
forces of the Caliphate of Muqtadir against the enemies of the Samanids, its
allies, and later against the Daylamites in eastern Iran, returned to Baghdad,
and this time came under the influence of Hâmid, whose intrigue was now aimed
mostly against a prominent Samanid vizir, Bal‘ami, the learned translator and
patron of
In order to regain power with the fickle and always
manipulatable Caliph Muqtadir, Hâmid, with Mu’nis’s support, set a plot to ruin
the Caliph’s most trusted officials, Ibn ‘Isâ and Nasr, as being too soft in
fiscal policy vis-à-vis the general populace and thus weakening the treasury
for flexible (i.e., usurious) investment of resources and consequently
diminishing the Caliph’s support for self-indulgences. Hâmid posed, as before,
as a defender of a hard fiscal policy. This time Hallaj became the clear
instrument for his return to power by being a favorite of Ibn ‘Isâ and Nasr
and by his “heresy”, if brought to trial, would reflect
directly on them. The plot was set in motion by Hâmid’s persuading Muqtadir,
over his mother’s protests, to remove Vizir Ibn ‘Isâ from Hallaj’s case to be
brought customarily before the Vizirial Court, and Nasr from custody of his
person in his confinement. A further figure, Ibn Mujâhid, the leader of the
body of Qur’an reciters and an enemy of Hallaj and other such mystics, approved
the process. Hallaj’s Hanbalite traditionalist supporters staged a
demonstration on his behalf against Hâmid on the same grounds as before, a
demonstration led by one of Hallaj’s most faithful disciples, one of the
official shuhûd, the upright witnesses, at his trial, Ibn ‘Atâ’. But the
demonstration only served the plot by showing that Hallaj and his followers
were a threat to law and order. The elder distinguished historian and Sunnite
moderate Tabari (d.310/923), though a friend of Ibn ‘Isâ, refrained from
involvement in the case on grounds of his rejection of violence, which led the
Hanbalites to demonstrate in turn outside his house.
In late March 922 (Qa‘da 309) Hâmid, in full ascendancy as
vizir, with his Hallajian rivals removed from positions of power through his
brutal maneuvering, and with the Cahiph’s mandate to guarantee public order by
any means, pushed the trial, judgement, and execution to conclusion.
Hamd’s account (Akhbâr, no. 2) presents his father
as completing his pre-dawn ritual prayer, and then repeating over and over the
word makr, “illusion”, until night almost ended. Then, after a long
silence, he cried out the word al-Haqq, “The Truth”. Then he wrapped
himself in his cloak, turned in the direction of Mecca, and spoke his munâjât,
ecstatic prayers.
We are here, we, Your witnesses.
We are seeking refuge in the splendor of Your
glory
In order that You reveal Yourself as You desire,
O You who are God in heaven and God on earth.
It is You who shine forth when You desire Just as You shone
forth Your divine decree In the most beautiful form in Adam,
The form in which the enunciating spirit resides
Present in knowledge and in speech, in will and
in existence.
How is it that You who were present in my self After they
had stripped me of my self Who used my self to proclaim Your self
Revealing the truth of my knowledge and my
miracles
Drawn
from my ascensions to the Thrones
Of Your pre-eternities to utter the Word which
creates me,
Now wish me to be seized, imprisoned, judged,
Executed, hung on the gibbet, my ashes to be thrown
To
the sandstorms that will scatter them
And the waves of the Tigris that will play with
them...
I weep to You for the souls whose present
witness
Goes now beyond the Where to meet the witness of
eternity.
I cry
to You for hearts so long refreshed
The Facts of His Life and
Theme of Disappearance 29
By clouds of revelation, which once filled up
with seas of wisdom.
I cry to You for the Word of God, which since it
perished
Has faded into nothing in our memory.
I cry to You for signs that have been gathered
up by intellects,
Now nothing reminds of them except debris.
I cry to You, I swear it by Your love,
For the witness of those whose only mount for
reaching You was silence.
All have crossed the desert, leaving neither
well nor trace behind,
Vanished like the ‘Ad tribe and their lost city
of Iram.
And after them the abandoned crowd is muddled on
their trails,
Blinder than beasts, blinder even than she-
camels.
The narrative of Hamd, after presenting the two prayers,
proceeds to the execution as follows:
Then he was quiet.
After that, his faithful servant, Ibrâhîm ibn Fâtik, said
to him: “Master, bequeath me a maxim. My father replied: “One’s fault-filled
self ( ‘uyub an- nafs) must be overcome or it will overcome one.”
When morning came, they led him from his prison, and I saw
him walking jubilantly in his chains, reciting: “My companion, so as not to
appear to wrong me, made me drink from his own
cup, as a host treats a guest; but as soon as the cup had
passed from hand to hand, He made the leather execution mat be brought and the
sword; thus it falls to him who drinks wine with the lion in the height of
summer.”
They led him then to the esplanade where before an enormous
crowd they cut off his hands and feet after having flogged him with 500 lashes
of the whip.
In the account of‘Attâr (Arberry tr., Tadhkirat, 270-271)
he is said to have “rubbed his bloody, amputated hands over his face, so that
both his arms and his face were stained with blood.”
“Why did you do that?” people enquired.
“Much blood has gone out of me,” he replied. “I realize
that my face will have grown pale. You suppose that my pallor is because I am
afraid. I rubbed blood over my face so that I might appear rose-cheeked in your
eyes. The cosmetic of heroes is their blood.”
“Even if you bloodied your face, why did you stain your
arms?”
“I was making ablution.”
“What ablution?”
“When one prays two rak‘as in love,” Hallaj replied,
“the ablution is not perfect unless performed in blood.”
“The executioners then plucked out his eyes; he was then
stoned by the crowd, after which they cut off his ears and nose. He uttered his
forgive-
In Hamd’s account, which corresponds in most details to
that of Sulami (d. 412/1021; Ta’rikh as-sûfiya), after the flaggelation
Hallaj was hoisted up onto the gibbet (su liba) and I heard him talking
ecstatically with God: “O my God, here am I now in the dwelling place of my
desire, where I contemplate Your marvels. O my God, since You witness
friendship even to whoever does You wrong, how is it You do not witness it to
this one to whom wrong is done because of You?”
Afterwards I saw Abû Bakr Shibli, who approached the
gibbet, cry out very loudly, the following verse: “Have we not forbidden you
(the gibbet) to receive any guest, man or angel?
Then he asked him: “What is Sufism?” He answered: “The
lowest degree one needs for attaining it is the one you behold.” Shibli asked
further: “What is the highest degree?” Hallaj responded: “It is out of reach
for you; but tomorrow you will see; for it is part of the divine mystery that I
have seen it and that it remains hidden to you.”
At the time of the evening prayer, the authorization by the
Caliph to decapitate Hallaj came. But is was declared by the officer in charge:
“It is too late: we shall put it off until tomorrow.”
When morning came, they took him down from the gibbet and
dragged him forth to behead him. I heard him cry out then, saying in a very
high voice: ‘All that matters for the ecstatic is that his Only One bring him
to His Oneness.”
Then he recited his verse: “Those who do not believe the
Final Hour call for its coming; but those who believe in it await it with
loving shyness knowing that this will be the coming of God.” These were his
last words.
His head was cut off, then his trunk was rolled up in a
straw mat, doused with fuel, and burned.
Later, they carried his ashes to the minaret on the Ra’s
al-Manara promontory beside the Tigris to disperse them to the wind.
Hâmid and his associates hoped that the public display of
Hallaj’s head, first hung on the prison wall and afterwards carried throughout
the Samanid districts of Khurasan, would dissuade would-be social reformers,
religious purists, and wavering political allies from opposition to ‘Abbasid
Caliphal (i.e., vizirial) banking and speculation policies. Behind the cynical
tax-farmer become vizir were many financial and religious figures whose interests
were served by his aggressive policies. Notable among these was a crafty and,
In summary, we can say that the world to Hallaj was in a
serious condition caused by humans afflicted with moral compromise and
blindness, the roots of which were self-indulgence, greed, officially condoned cruelty,
decadence, all things separating the Community from God, true guidance, and
grace. As with Hasan of Basra long before him, the darkness had to be
recognized and offset by self-examination and ascetical purification rather
than by mere criticism of others. But unlike the celebrated progenitor of
Muslim mystical ascèse, Hallaj based his personal mission and witness
of the transcendent source Himself, on the One he called Beloved or Friend or
You and ultimately his Only Self. His concentration from the time of his first hajj
to Mecca was on the overwhelming relationship with the Real, the One Creative
Truth, al-Haqq, a relationship whose threshold was “spiritual anguish” {Dîwân
M.XVII) and whose destiny, in his own case, was condemnation and death at the
hands of jealous and
manipulative government and religious bureaucrats. And
after his death, for centuries, even to the present day, he has remained a
subject of controversy and devotion, of denial and affection: on the one hand,
examined by those traditionalist experts in Islamic Sacred Law and Shi'ite
legitimists bent on preserving their respective notions of authority; and on
the other hand, revered by disciples and ordinary folk preserving and transforming
his name into legend. Later we shall touch on one highly influential
traditionalist reexamination and support for the verdict, extreme punishment,
and execution given Hallaj, that of Ibn Taymiya (d. 728/1328).
II
“So kill me now my faithful friends
for in my killing is my life.”
-Dîwân, LM ed. Qasîda X; Sh. ed.
14.
THE RESURFACING OF HIS LIFE AND ITS
REPEATED IMPACT
It is the death of Hallaj as told by
eyewitnesses and kept alive in popular and literary accounts by later mystics,
biographers and historians that transcends the remoteness of his time and
brings him close to us. That he was warned when a very young apprentice Sufi by
Junayd and others among his masters who were less headstrong and passionate
than he that his death would be violent, public, and the result of a
condemnation of dire legal and spiritual consequences became a crucial part of
his legend. Fictional most probably, though like ingredients accruing to form a
myth around a real heroic and historic figure, the inclusion of his long
anticipation, acceptance, and finally welcoming of his death became his
singular most unsettling attribute. This attribute should underscore for
students of comparative mysticism that this old and highly sophisticated tradition of Sufism had in his time
drawn its boundaries and thresholds not to cross, having pushed its way to
those limits theoretically and experimentally, in its Khurasan and Baghdad
schools, prior to him, especially on the forbidden incarnational matter of the
experience of personal union with God. Other mystics such as Dhû’l-Nûn,
Bâyezîd Bistâmî, Nûrî, Tirmidhî, and Ibn ‘Atâ’, to mention just a few cited
previously who are also subjects of this series, had also meditated the
possibility of this experience as their mystical goal and understood its risks.
Hallaj was thus part of a tradition and, more particularly, of only one
emphasis within that tradition that was older than himself and that would
survive the horror of his death. Junayd and other advocates of the “sobriety” (sahw)
versus the “intoxication” (sukr) emphasis seem to have understood the
dangers to the tradition of separate, individual inspiration (ilhâm) as
verified by the death of Hallaj. For their heirs and for most traditionalists
over the centuries he also became a legend proving the wisdom of the forbidden.
For both enthusiastic supporters and prudent rejectors of the way of a Hallaj
the death itself was thus the doorway to myth. And Husayn ibn Mansûr “al-
Hallâf' has this remarkable transhistoric power of myth to stir deep
emotion and imagination in an entire culture and beyond.
The Resurfacing of His
Life and its Repeated impact 37
For the folk so-called his mythic power and the legend of
his life come in the form of consolations through retellings of his sufferings:
consolations to victims of injustice or disease or mothers in the pains of
childbirth or barren women yearning to give birth to a “saint of love” like
Hallaj. That he knew he would die on the gibbet under the weight of Sacred Law
that he upheld even as he cried out for help from his fellow Muslims to save
him from God (Akhbâr 38; note Q. 72:22 = “no one can save me from God.”)
becomes the inspiration and impetus of repeated tellings of his story and
callings upon him for intercession. In each retelling one is made to face its
full reality and, in asking why it happened, one is made to see the convergence
of historical forces and personages moving or, in a Tolstoian sense, moved by
them; and beyond all that, one sees this rather small 64year old man whose
intimacy with his known yet unknowable God finds its desired fulfdlment through
this terrifying and officially sanctioned death. Hallaj arouses hostility and
denial yet also gives consolation. His death is his personal seal on his beliefs
and his authentication, not to be imitated or seen as the highest rung on the
mystical ladder, as he told his friend Shiblî, but the proof of his unwavering
devotion — and not merely to a principle, but to the One he knew as his Self
who made him forget his own name
through his complete immersion (istighrâq) in love.
The lived text of his life and death reveals the teachings he absorbed from the
Qur’an, first and foremost, and secondarily from other influences, Christian,
Hellenistic, neo-Gnostic, current in his time. Discussion among scholars
concerning his “orthodoxy”, pro and con, and his efforts at synthesis found in
his more didactic and philosophical writings continues to the present-day
(note the discussion Massignon reviews at length in Passion, 2nd ed.,
Eng. tr. v.l, p.518 ff: “The Hallajian Testament of Faith”}. But beyond
this indeed serious question remains the dogmatic intensity of his practiced
faith and the sweetness of his intimacy of love for God and for humanity expressed
in his lyric poetry. Apart from the legality or political exigency of his
appalling execution and the questions that persist regarding either, one
receives ripples of fright at the thought that faith could lead one to such an
end in any civilized society. And Islamic society was indeed civilized in
Hallaj’s time, with all the accoutrements of culture, manners, learning and
sophistication current in its cities, especially Baghdad. Indeed the wealth
and patronage for humane learning and scientific research in a variety of
areas, including literature, law, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and
traditional religious sciences, was at one of its apogees in Islam. The
The Resurfacing of His Life and its Repeated impact 39 form,
indeed the fact, of such an execution was thus and still remains an unresolved
shock to the civilization through those aware of it. One reaction current
today among many retraditionalists romanticizing the heights and omitting the
contradictions is to deny it ever happened or to claim by interpolation of
“facts” into old sources that it may have happened but to someone else of no
importance, not to someone of this man’s following and obvious importance: an
interpolation process common enough in Hallaj’s own time and recurring often
enough in ours. Meanwhile a man known by many as “al-Hallâj” continues to dance
in his chains on the esplanade of historic memory. He remains there, in
that place. People touch him as he passes through them, some to strike him, to
push him further away, some to grasp at his clothing or his beard for a
possible relic, mesmerized by the publicity of his coming death, and some to
reassure and even make known their presence as a consolation. No shallow
sentiment involved, no false sincerity, no claim to prophethood, sainthood or
messiahhood, in this “witness” who dared to speak of God as “You. Between
lovers who can say who is the lover, who the beloved?” The sober rememberer of
this day or of any others it brings to mind in other civilizations at their
self-proclaimed apogees needs relief from memory, a pause that is prolonged,
not allowing
serious reflection but only a return to one’s own everyday
life of incidentals and absurdities, in which even traces of yearning for God
must not persist and keep one in a state of at least semianxiety: a state in
which the so-called Hallajian way takes root and Hallaj resurfaces with his
direct transparent expressions of love and he is once again on that esplanade
and we are in the mob, even as supposedly detached historians, uncertain as to
what our arms and minds are reaching for or against. To resolve our
uncomfortable dilemma we look to the authorities that issued the condemnation,
and laugh a little in relief from the terror that it could ever happen to
oneself. One is protected at last from oneself by authority, serving in the
Community of Islam’s name, that puts such a heretic and public enemy to death.
Only God the Merciful the Compassionate truly knows and provides.
“Did you not know,” one anguished Sufi shouted at the
gibbet, “you were not to receive a guest?” and threw a rose at the guest’s
heart, at the bleeding Husayn ibn Mansûr who read hearts.
We are hosts as humans to our guests , we are not gibbets .
It cannot be God who does this thing, the most troubled Sufis argue inwardly
and among themselves; not the Essence of Hospitality, the Essence of all
Desire. But it cannot be other than God also, for it is God’s Law that has
decreed the
A vivid recollection of Hallaj’s martyrdom brings spiritual
and human contradiction. For most, as we mentioned before, denial is the only
recourse. God couldn’t permit the execution in His Law’s name of an innocent;
therefore, this Hallaj was given the punishment to preserve the truth of God’s
teaching and Law. Justice was done. Or, from another perspective, how could
Hallaj have loved his ultimate Judge and punisher? Only if he rose above
himself in some way to celebrate his own annihilation, his fana . Thus
we can feel more reassured in our pain at his suffering and can deny our fear
and sorrow, even as we turn to accept the trial God gives us for our sakes. Our
self is our source of agony, as Hasan of Basra said and as Hallaj restated when
he said to a disciple: “Master your self lest your self master you.” He
recognized the evil in himself and welcomed God’s annihilation of his self. The
path of extreme asceticism leading to mystical love is truly dangerous, for it
teaches annihilation of self; it leads one to painful punishment, to the death
of Hallaj.
The law of moderation, of devout obedience, not
intoxication and ecstasy and experience of God Himself outside the
prescriptions of the Law, is the only proper path of life for one, for us, for
all those who would transcend suffering brought
on by self. It is the majority’s way of denying a “witness”
like Hallaj a place in the heart or even access to “reading” and stirring one’s
desires. The only sure guidance is God’s as given in His “reading”. The rest is
self and its presumptions. We can accept Hallaj’s poetry as edifying and pure
to a point. But his death was ordained, accepted by him, and enacted as a
protection for us not as a way for us to follow. Still, he is dancing in his
chains. He is hanging on the gibbet. His image surfaces.
Louis Massignon (1883-1962), in his magisterial study of
Hallaj, saw this mystic’s martyrdom as central to the spiritual development of
Islamic history, whereas many scholars, Western and Islamic, have viewed it as
marginal and anomalous to it; and, while admiring the noted French scholar’s
erudition and his remarkable belief, as a Catholic, in the authenticity of the
Qur’anic inspiration as coming from the God of Abraham and in his steadfastness
in support of this contention, some have scored him for exaggerating the
importance of such an obscure and largely forgotten figure or indeed of any
individual “hero” of any time and any place. Yet, leaving the case of Massignon
and his critics and admirers aside, as he himself would’ve wished in deference
to the teaching and, in his view, the “witness” of Hallaj himself, this obscure
figure resurfaces across time
While he may not represent, as Massignon argued, an “axial
point’ in the religious culture of Islam, he evokes many of its historic
contradictions and was subject to many of its principal recurring themes. A
review of such is not inappropriate for our understanding of this mystic and
his fate.
Though it is surely an exaggeration to suggest that Hallaj
was fully aware of his historic importance or of his role as a magnet
attracting the major themes of his civilization to himself, he did find himself
conflicted by a series of dichotomies, two of which were admirably reflected by
the 14th century social historian Ibn Khaldûn (d. 808/
1406): the theme of the sedentary versus the nomadic with
its roots in the ancient Near Eastern depictions of declining citadel
civilizations and emerging tribal peoples from the Steppe; and the theme of ‘asabiyya
or group-tribal solidarity as the binding social and even religious force in
the early Arab configurations. It is not too fanciful to suggest that the
fourth/tenth century recurrences or variations on these themes affecting Hallaj
were the dichotomies and apparent contradictions between institutional and
individual religious vocations, between literal adherence to the text of
Revealed Law and the emergence of serious testimonies of direct experience,
that had become intensified since the aforementioned Hasan of Basra and Râbi‘a
al-‘Adawîya with the development of mystical schools and systematic manuals
demonstrating and guiding “states and stages” of experience and arguing the
boundaries of Sacred Law vis-à-vis the temptations and impulses of such
experience. Secondly, Hallaj and many other mystics like himself of Persian
origin, sons or grandsons of converts from Zoroastrianism or Greek
Christianity, found themselves caught in the ethnic tension between Persian and
Arab cultures with Arabic being the dominant “institutional” culture drawn
from the Qur’anic Sacred Law and Arab scholars being the primary “worldbuilders”
of Islamic tradition. Further, as mysti-
“Hallaj broke away, because he was worn out by spiritual
dryness and the hypocritical “fraternal corrections” of those hermits who
cultivate their perfection sealed off from reality, keeping for them-selves the
words of life that could save others and only intoxicate themselves.”
Though the comment is more insightful than literal, it
underscores the historical fact of a professional structuring that led Hallaj
and other individualistic mystics mentioned previously as being like him to
forego the support and security of a movement, a school, a group consciousness,
without however denouncing the tradition of Sufism or its religion of Islam;
indeed they conceived their actions as spontaneous and vital
renewals of both and were revered as such by later mystics
who reabsorbed them institutionally, such as ‘Attâr (d. 626/1229) and Rûmî (d.
672/1273).
As for the matter of ethnic tension, those Persians writing
in Arabic like Hallaj, who did not know the Persian of his time and who
preceded the later fourth/tenth century development of New Persian and the
beginnings of its great literary renascence that would over-shadow Arabic in both
profane and mystical poetry, were obliged to focus almost exclusively by
necessity on issues of Arabic Muslim Law and traditionalism and within their
didactic literary frameworks offered only moments of spontaneous lyric mystical
flights. Within both the fields of law and of mysticism, which were by no means
inherently exclusive of one another, a significant number of the leaders were
of Persian origin and were personally sympathetic to Hallaj and other such
mystics but were fearful of any variance from mainstream Arabicized
institutional authority: especially in Sacred Law and in Caliphal politics
whose only legitimate purpose was to uphold it.
A Hallaj appeared by consequence a radical individualist
through his rejection of “spiritual dryness” and through the public display of
his “conversations with God” (shath) and his calling upon the Justice of
God (the sayha bi’l-Haqq) against the decadent wasteful unegalitarian
politi-
A further variation on the ‘asabiyya theme, to be
touched on only briefly here with regard to Hallaj, was the neo-Hellenistic
movement which found its impetus and at least partial legitimacy with the
patronage under Caliph al-Ma’mûn of the Bayt al-hikma translation center
in the early decades of the third/ninth century. The center injected a new
rival tradition into the Islamic Community and with it a new critical approach
to traditionalist learning and knowledge. The Qur’an (18:19) states most
suggestively, “We awakened them that they might question one another.” Again,
it is not fanciful to consider one correspondence between the Qur’anic kahf
and Plato’s legend of the cave at least symbolic of the conflict
between the Qur’anic traditionalists and the new
speculative dogmatists, the so-called Mu’tazilites, that would dominate the
intellectual atmosphere for the rest of the century and establish permanently
yet another quasi-sectarian dichotomy within Islam. Without reiterâting the
many issues on which traditionalism and Mu‘tazilism fixed their irreconcilable
differences, the primary difference was surely the matter of “questioning”
itself: the subjects permitted to be open to questioning, and the freedom of
the individual to question. Questioning existed in both of these “traditions”,
but the contemporary emergence of movements of “retraditionalization” remind us
of the attitudes and tensions dominating the atmosphere of Hallaj’s time in
which commentaries on the Qur’anic questioning cited above were aimed at
strengthening ritual observance and a deeper understanding of obedience to God,
against the laxity in observance and morals of the new philosophical questioners
and speculators and the Community’s cultural elite who had patronized them at
least privately when traditionalists regained the political upperhand. For
Hallaj the language of philosophical inquiry affected permanently the pedagogy
of orthodox mysticism and the analysis of its first-hand experience; like the
Thomist St.John of the Cross, the lexically neo-Hellenistic Hallaj both
analyzed systematically and lived his mystical
Much of Hallaj’s fate lay with a very basic recurring theme
in Islam, one indeed underlying all of the aforementioned themes and apparent
contradictions; namely, the problem of authority whose resolutions generated
conflict and disunity. The assumption, based on Qur’anic revelation, among the
true believers of Islam, is that authority, throughout time, is vested only in
God, not in any mortal being or idol claimed by mortals to represent God.
Authority is thus a transcendent
principle and an attribute reserved to God alone. The
authority of the Prophet, and that of his immediate four so-called Rightly
Guided Successors, on a secondary plane to his, is owed entirely to God and,
according to the majority of Muslims, has not been continued historically
since. Authenticity of experience, spiritual or secular, as a consequence
could only be attained by extreme self-sublimation and humility before God,
achievable only by practise of the ritual duties of the faith and strict
adherence to the commandments of God as explicitly revealed in the Qur’an. Such
authenticity is achieveable and sought by humans but does not invest them with
divine authority. Hallaj’s claim to union with God to the point where God was
his “only Self” made him vulnerable to accusations of forbidden
associationism, something the early Mu‘tazilities believed by their enlightened
questioning they were helping to eliminate from orthodox Islam. But as we know,
in the end it was not the orthodox traditionalist Muslims targetted for such
enlightenment nor mainstream Shi’ites en groupe who thought him a
“heretic” worthy of death.
In the eighth/fourteenth century, however, a major
Hanbalite traditionalist, Ibn Taymiya (728/ 1328), reexamined the trial and
execution of Hallaj and concluded the condemnation and terms were just. Louis
Massignon, in the 2nd volume of his Passion of al-Hallaj (Eng. ed., pp.
4549), presents in full three of Ibn Taymiya’s fatwas
(1) The answer to two questions
concerning Hallaj:
1st question'. Is this an honest (siddiq) or perfidious (zindiqj man? Is
this a venerable saint (wall muttaqi), the possessor of a divine grace (hâl
rahmânî) or an adept at magic; and
2nd question:
Was he executed for zandaqa in accordance with the opinion of the
assembly of ‘ulamii of Islam? or was he in fact unjustly (executed)?
Answer: Hallaj was justly condemned. And anyone who is not
of this opinion is either hypocritical or ignorant; and whoever approves of him
must be killed like him.
After recounting his life and travels, some details of his
writings’ subjects, trials and punishments, Ibn Taymiya concludes he was an
unrepentant satanic being.
(2) In another fatwâ he
dismisses with equal ferocity any claim the followers may make to the sanctity
of Hallaj based on his practices, his ecstasies and various utterances, and his
ideas. He
concludes in speaking “for us ‘ulama, we have the
formula of divine unity (Tawhid) which has been prescribed for us, the
way of God that has been laid down for us, and from both we have learned, that
“what Hallaj said is only falsehood” (quoting Ibn Dâwûd, Hallaj’s rival) and
that those like him deserve death.”
(3) In a third fatwâ,
Ibn Taymiya reiterates many of Hallaj’s own Sufi contemporaries’ opinions
opposing his extreme mysticism of union with God:
A. Ecstasy had temporarily cut
off his reason, he spoke in amorous delirium;
B. He was lucid and he
revealed the mystery, even that of Tawhîd, which made his execution
necessary.
Hallaj, he concludes, was not pardonable based on excuses
of (A), but was in fact lucid and was thus rightly condemned for blasphemy
against the Qur’an and his teaching that the hajj could be performed
fully outside Mecca. He was thus a sorcerer served by demons.
Traditionalism would seem to have thus resurfaced
effectively by its very opposition to a resurfaced mystical deviation in a
continuous dialectic through time. Apologetics continued its process of
worldbuilding, albeit on a greatly reduced scale following the Mongol invasion
of Baghdad in 1258 AD and with it the termination of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate and
its illusion of authority.
Ill
One of the likely causes for antipathy to Hallaj, both his
person and his teaching, stems in part from his many travels through foreign
lands and his association with persons of other faiths and beliefs. There is
more than a little Arab ethnocen- tricity in the severity of Ibn Taymiya’s
reaffirmation of the condemnation and indeed in his postMongol ethnically
dispersed and beleagured notion of “us ‘ulamâ”.’ Hallaj was, as he believed
inwardly Muhammad his Prophet to be, a univer- salist on all levels while
remaining a practitioner of a particular ritual path, that of Islam.
On the level of Islam’s relation with the other Abrahamic
religions of the monotheistic revelation, he had this to say (Abr. Passion,
p. 104; Vol. 1, pp. 193-4):
“I have pondered as to how to give religious
faiths an experimental definition
And I formulate it as a single Principle with
many branches.
Do not demand therefore that your companion in discussion
adopt this or that confessional denomination.
That would prevent him from arriving at honest
union (with you and with God).
It is up to the Principle Himself to come to
this man, and to clarify
In him all of the supreme meanings: and then
this man will understand (everything).
He was accused by his enemies of dissimulation and
opportunism by associating with neo- Helenists, philosophers, aesthetes,
pseudo-mystics, magicians, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans,
Hindus, Buddhists, the rich and the poor, indiscriminately on his travels
throughout the Near East, Iran, India and possibly even China; and at home with
adepts of radical Shi’ism while claiming the heritage and identity of a strict
traditionalist.
He represented in this regard a persistent recurrence in
Islam of the impulse for universalism versus the fearful retrenchment and
consolidation preached by so many of the ascetical and politically motivated
traditionalists to the common people and literalists they influenced, if not
controlled through their schools. His was the mentality of a traveler who found
God as the Host of the worlds and hospitality thus as universal, not merely a
cultural phenomenon among Arabs or any other single ethnic group, while many
others, both Shi‘ite and Sunnite, Persian and Arab, believed God was their
Qur’anic totem exclusive to themselves: the monotheistic sin, as it has been
called by modern religious universalists. What kept Hallaj from syncretism was
his steadfast undeniable practise of his faith, which did not seem to him a
contradiction to his universalism: because his Beloved was the source of
everything to him and was free in His creativeness, His compassion, and His
hospitality.
{Passion,
vol. l,p. 194:) “Understand, my brothers — God grant to you and to us the good
fortune of being in His grace — that observance {‘ibáda) is the fruit of
knowledge... Indeed, this is the road to joy, the route to Paradise...;
obedience to God (tâ‘a) is our indispensable provision...”: meaning
fulfillment of the Sacred Law’s obligations.
For Hallaj, who believed in the Law of Unity, its divine
Reality was not negated by the seemingly ubiquitous evidence of social and
political and religious disunity in the this-worldly sense, but by the narrow
supposed higher affirmation of God’s Unity by the convinced pietists, and in
the highest pietistic sense by the angelic witness, Iblis, whom, Hallaj
questioned unto self-revelation during his long imprisonment.
The Truth was universal to Hallaj; it was God Himself, the
freer from self, the resolver of contradictions, the One whom he adored in His
Unity and Singularity unto the disappearance of himself. The Tawhîd was
the realization beyond the rungs of one’s asceticism, ecstasies, and martyrdom,
as uttered to Shibli.
To Satan, the narrowest monotheist, who disregards all but
Transcendent Unity, however, and considers the existence of humanity an
aberration to be rejected, there is no Unity in which such contradiction is
resolved to his purist satisfaction. Satan’s only recourse in his intransigent
state, is to teach human beings that they are separate from God, by dualizing
being, and making himself “the third”, “the only one who separates each of
you — in order to proclaim You Holy. “(Passion, vol. 1, p. 483)
The mystic lovers, such as Hallaj and his forerunners
(Nuri) and followers (Ibn ‘Atâ’), are therefore the dialoguers (wrestlers in
the old Biblical sense) with the Devil, for they cross in their love the
threshold of the forbidden by desiring the Judgement of God alone and accepting
the Judgement carried out by man in receiving, even unto agony and death, the
ecstasy of the one’s illumination as the sanctification of their hearts. The
difference between the accursed saint and the fallen angel, apart from the
distinction in their natures, is in the one’s surrendering of his heart to the
sanctifying grace of the Uniting Spirit and in the other’s self-deception of a
scorned lover unable to bear the Divine Fire’s action of extending to others
His secret of eternal life.
“Desire is the fire from the Light of the primordial
Fire... the fire of Desire inflames them with Reality whether they are near to
it or far.” (Hallaj, Abr. Passion, p. 173)
Evil comes thus not from some inherent brutishness in a
prejudged base nature of man, despite the satanic view of such and the manifestations
of brutishness in the world, but from the spiritually blinding jealousy caused
by misdirected love that leads the embittered to accelerate the world’s and his
own self-destruction.
As indicated before, see Passion, vol. 3, pp.
306-327, for the text and full discussion of Tâ Sin’ al-Azal. Here
follows further excerpts relevant to the present study and to the universalist
theme.:
“My mind is going mad because of You !
What is Adam? Nothing but for You !
Who am I then, I, Satan, to distinguish him from
You!”
That is, I upheld the Law You set forth. I will not adore
Your creature separately from You, nor in fact Your creatures at all in You.
“I serve Him more purely (thus)...”
“So, by His truth, no, I have not sinned with regard to His
decree; I have not challenged destiny! And I am not disturbed by the distortion
of my form. I preserve my balance through these maxims. Were He to punish me
with His fire for all eternity, I would not bow down before anyone... My
declaration is that of sincere people. I myself am sincere in love!”
(Cf. Akhbâr59: “There is no public declaration of
love that doesn’t conceal a lack of propriety.”)
Hallaj himself bowed down before questionable and corrupt
authorities in his final acceptance of martyrdom in order to draw the Community
together against him and, in this sense, against that satanic self that
retained a measure of separateness from God.
“How could I humble myself before Adam, You created me of
fire and him of earth; those two opposites cannot be reconciled. And
furthermore, I have served You for a longer time, I have a higher virtue, a
vaster knowledge, and a more perfect (contemplative) function.”
On the notion of Satan as a “martyr of love”:
"... reward me, Master, since I am desolate. ... the origin of my vocation
was bitter.
Let he who wishes to record it hear this
declaration of mine,
Read it, and know that I am a martyr.”
And then the end of his state of bitterness is described:
“The spring from which he draws is a low-lying pool, sucked dry.”
Hallaj extends his role of commentator beyond the persona
of Satan to satanic spirituality among mystics in general: “Satan is more informed
than (those most eloquent mystics who kept silent about him; that is, than
those afraid to speak about the forbidden) on the matter of worship; he is
closer than they to His Being; he has devoted himself more zealously to serve
Him; he has kept more to his vow than they; he has drawn nearer than they to
the Beloved.”
Again, Hallaj’s teaching that God gives humans His grace
of closeness in the form of anguish, through their desire to risk even the
forbidden to know and serve Him more fully. As a human being, however, he is
paradoxical, whereas Satan remains doggedly consistent to himself (in
“balance”) through rejection of any incarnation in Adam based on the undecreed
notion that God has given to such a man a secret of Himself, a unifying soul.
Hallaj both risks violation of the haram and ultimately surrenders
through complete acceptance of the Law. Satan upholds the Law without that
anguish caused by violating it, which, in his mind, would be to bow down before
(that is, to share in any way the experience of) God’s creature. Paradox is
the human, not the angelic, condition; for Satan there is bitterness, not anguish.
“Anguish from being blamed is so unknown to me, therefore
do not blame me (for witnessing consistently Your Transcendent Truth).”
And finally, prior to his discussion in this remarkable
work of God’s nature, proof of existence, plan, and instruction of how to
witness, Hallaj concludes that for all his devotion Satan “was muddled. He
ceased to trust in God. He said “I am worth more than Adam.” He remained on
this side of the veil. “He wallowed in mud and embraced damnation (himself) for
the eternity of eternities.”
There are some memorable aphorisms at the end of the work,
including the following:
“The sage is “he who sees”; and Wisdom, It, resides “in Him
Who exists.” The sage abides by his act of knowledge (irfân) and becomes
thereby the act of knowledge itself; but Wisdom is beyond that, and its Object
(God) even more so.”
“Moreover, fables,” such as he has just told in his
dramatic dialogue with Satan, “are the concern of story tellers, and Wisdom the
concern of (those to whom it is gratuitously given).”
“Civility fits public figures, as exorcism fits the
possessed; remembrance appeals to those who grieve, forgetfulness to those who
grow up wild.”
“For the true God is the Real, and the created world is
only creation; and there is no harm in that.”
The last point indicates in Hallaj an acceptance beyond
Satan’s comprehension that creation doesn’t diminish God. Giving another perspective,
perhaps more “theologically correct”, one of Hallaj’s early teachers, ‘Amr Makki,
remarked “The Creator does no harm to His creation.”
In Hallaj, the crosser of the threshold into the forbidden
knowledge of God through union in love, discovers a quality of God unknown to
most of the dour and basically timid mystics of his time, that God as Truth or,
as he says in this same work, “the dwelling place of truth,” is also the source
of irony and paradox and freedom of thought about such forbidden subjects as
Satan, and ultimately the way to unveiling the mystery of the statement that
God is the Lord of the worlds {rabbi’l-‘âlamîri), and thus the inviter
to an acceptance of the two creations’ oneness in Him rather than the condemner
of one in extreme deference to the other through obsessive preoccupation with
nature’s corruptibility. Hallaj’s universality and “balance” is distinct from
his Satan portrait’s, in that his own is based on a decentering of himself
rather than a retaining of himself, through a substitution and attachment (mahabbd)
of God’s Self for his surrendered self, so that he then dwells only in Truth,
not as a statement against falsehood, but as a spiritually desired state to
which he has arrived in a series of foreshadowings in his heart up to the final
place of union, beyond the final death of his self. The human condition
vis-à-vis ultimate knowledge of itself, always elusive and beyond itself, is
the recognition and acceptance first of contradiction: between strict and
particular adherence and universalistic yearning and thought, and between a
series of apparent opposites that one must perceive without being able to
ultimately resolve. Through his own engagement with conflicting historical
forces, past and present, and his relatively detached movement through a vide
range of often contradictory social, religious, and ethnic and racial circles,
he reflects in this and other works ascribed to him a deep knowledge of the
human condition and a balanced acceptance of its choices. For him neither the
bitter purist nor the speculative universalist path was possible. The former
confronted him through his long imprisonment, the latter was his likely
devil’s advocate during his prior “mission” in the world.
IV
As indicated previously, Hallaj was not unique within
Islamic mysticism in his desire to unite with God or in his teachings to that
end. And though there are important distinctions in character and emphasis
between the vividly remembered and the less commemorated of the individual
mystics, especially regarding the degree of union possible and allowable within
the bounds of Qur’anic Sacred Law, the common link throughout the tradition is
not originality or innovation but continuity and solidarity. The starting and
the ending point for mystics as for all adherents was and is the Qur’an. As
Hallaj was reported to have insisted (see Rûzbihân Baqlî, Sharh-i-shathiyât,
Les Paradoxes des soufis, ed. H. Corbin, Tehran and Paris, 1966, p. 265):
“Whoever knows the Qur’an resides in the Resurrection.” But the notion of
mystics conceiving an extreme witness of Tawhîd, a Hallaj, for instance,
is of course not stated or indicated in the Holy Book, nor is the idea Ôf a
tradition of mysticism as such and thus is held in suspicion by literalist guardians of the text of
the Revelation as the tradition bursts forth and begins to unfold from late in
the first Islamic century onward. The burst, as noted, comes recurringly from
the inevitably ascetical impulse to reform the disunited Community whose
governing principle and very basis of identity as Islamic is Unity: through
internal purification which cannot be achieved by outward action and social
criticism. Asceticism of the heart within oneself was therefore the first step
in the progress of the soul’s witnessing of the essential unity of God revealed
and taught in the Qur’an. It was not an individualistic path in its original
conception nor in the teaching of Hallaj. Behavioral differences aside, such a
notion was outside the thought of the early mystics of Islam, whether in
Khurasan or Iraq. The model for the strict sublimation of self in service to
the Qur’an was of course the Prophet Muhammad, who is therefore the rightful
first witness of a mystical path conceived in the minds of all subsequent
“mystics”, including Hallaj despite his regarding the Prophet as having shied
away from witnessing prematurely God’s lifting of the veil between Himself and
His creatures thereby delaying the coming of the Judgement (in Tawâsîri). From
the Prophet onward thus, in Hallaj’s thought, the ascetical mystics were
continuing “witnesses” (shawâhid), including himself in the series,
through time. This was characteristic of the tradition in the general sense
among those who practised the so- called ‘ilm al-qulûb, the “science of
hearts”, apart from the abddl, the “substitute saints” specially chosen
to expiate through suffering for the whole Community, one of whom Louis
Massignon in his many studies of Hallaj believed him to be. This latter subject
remains controversial among both Muslim and Western scholars continuing to
argue on the exegetical plane, with Massignon’s textual erudition the starting
point of the discussion, one that is beyond the limits of this study. Suffice
it to say for our purposes that Hallaj in his time, given the prior and
continuing development of strong Qur’anic based so-called “orthodox” schools of
Law solidly resistant to Mu‘tazilite speculative thought, did not veer far in
the substance of his “mission”’s teaching from the fundamentals of his faith.
His writings do not reveal an original message, but rather a person extending
the message through very narrow limits of analogical thinking and unprofane
metaphoric evocations to communicate freely and openly among adherents yearning
for the Reality he embraced in moments beyond the veil. This was preaching and
experience beyond the manuals, the established lexicon of the school mystics,
the competence of the law to judge, and the right of any individual, not to
witness, but to reveal. In reviewing ‘Attâr’s tadhkirat collection of
the lives and emphases of the mystics, including Hallaj, who was given the
longest notice, one finds the consistent call for the practise of voluntary
poverty, further inward asceticism and privation, and tawakkul or trust
in God alone: all internalizing the essential message closer and closer to the
unveiling, the kashf, and the experience of embracing the One. Hallaj’s
fatal “originality” was that as an “orthodox” and extremely pious Muslim he
“revealed,” an indiscretion reserved to heterodox Mahdists, crackpots, and
madmen feigning or real.
Another extreme lover of God to recall here was the
previously cited Dhu’l-Nûn (245/859), on whose forehead at his death was
written, according to Hujwîrî’s Kashf al-mahjûb, the earliest biographical
manual of mysticism in New Persian (Hujwîrî, d. 466/1072), “This is the friend
of God, who died in love of God, killed by God.” (H. 100) Hujwiri records the
tradition that Dhû’l-Nûn set forth the notion of gnosis (ma‘rifa),
mystical knowledge of God beyond deductive learning. Scholars see in him the
fusion of neo-Platonist and Qur’anic formulations alluded to before and
apparent in Hallaj (note: E.G. Browne, H. Corbin, L. Massignon, S.N. Nasr, AM
Schimmel, et al). Also cited previously and noteworthy to recall is the Persian
Bâyezîd Bistâmî, whose shathîyât or “conversations with God”
foreshadowed those of Hallaj and aroused the interest of the sober head of the
Baghdad school, Junayd. Though some scholars have seen Hindu influences on
Bâyezîd, AM Schimmel has concluded that he “reached his goal by means of the
Islamic experience of fana , annihilation, as he formulated it for the
first time, rather than by an experience that, in the Vedantic sense, would
have led him to an extension of the atman, “the innermost self’. (Myst.
Dim. of Islam, pp. 47-48) Bâyezîd, though he may like other Muslim mystics
reflect comparative or corresponding formulations current in the
third/ninth-fourth/ tenth centuries in the schools of Khurasan and Baghdad and
their satellites, defined extinction of the self more totally, in what would
become the Hallajan vein, to the point of saying Subhânî or Praise to
Me, meaning God in me, as his shath reveals, or “I am God,” the mingling
and confusion of lover with Beloved in love, which anticipates Hallaj’s
realization.
These principal ideas of Hallaj, ones which became
associated in both the popular and the more critically denouncing mind with him
alone, were thus expressed and experienced at least in potential by others as
common property, so to speak, and by common blending or synthesis from a
Qur’anic revelation setting the spiritual fact that when “He loves them, they
love Him” (‘Attâr 1:67 quoting Q 5:59) and when one knows God, one “knows God
by God” (Sarrâj, d. 377/987, K. alluma, ed. R.A. Nicholson, 19). Both
reveal God’s prior inspiration of human response in love, the essential step to
the mystic’s decentering of self and recentering in God. While the degree and
depth of influence from neo-Hellenistic or from Hindu philosophy upon these
early mystics is challenging to ascertain, and the Qur’anic basis of their
original inspiration and the object of their devotion is clearly defined in all
of the manuals and collections of lives (Hujwîrî, ‘Attâr, Sarrâj, Sulamî, d.
412/1021, et al) for obvious apologetical reasons, the question of a given
mystic’s uniqueness is very remote from Islamic consciousness and from the
goal of mysticism itself. And synthesis does not constitute originality but one
of the commonest recurring themes in both Islamic history and mysticism.
The point here is to identify Hallaj as part of highly
developed and systematically presented mystical tradition in Islam, and to try
to know him as part of a collective Muslim consciousness, universalistic in the
Abrahamic monotheistic sense, adhering and responsive to the traditionalist
conception of Sacred Law and ritual devotion. The very notion of one’s being
unique or original belonged to the self and its illusions to be annihilated
through union with God the Unique One singled in Himself. This understanding of
God’s Self was the result of Qur’anic revelation and centuries of ever
deepening interior meditation on that revelation, even unto the Hallajian
risk.
Here follows a number of expressions of union with God
attributed to Hallaj in his most characteristic vein of spare, direct ecstatic
utterance or narrative account of mystical love:
Akhbâr 3:
“And You became the personal consciousness within my inmost self.”
Qur’an 72:22 as quoted Akhbâr 10:“ “No one can save
me from God,” for He has ravished me in myself and doesn’t return me to who I
am;”... nor have I any refuge but Him. ” ”
Ibid.-,
“And there is no moment given me when He veils Himself from my glances to give
me some relief; and this even to the point of annihilating my humanity in His
divinity, to the disappearance of my body in the light of His essence...”
Ibid.-. “On
the one hand, I feel no power to affirm the respect due to this Presence; on
the other, I tremble for fear of being abandoned and becoming forsaken and cast
away. Unfortunate is whosoever finds himself forsaken after knowing such a
Presence and abandoned after such a union.”
Akhbâr 1:
When Husayn ibn Mansur was led out to be crucified, he looked up at the gibbet
and at the nails and laughed so loudly that tears poured from his eyes...
“O my God ! You who appear to me on all sides but do not
veil my side, I call to You in trust that You will bring forth my due and in
trust that I bring forth Your due.”
Akhbâr 11:
“I find it strange that the Divine Whole can be borne by my little human part,
Yet due to my little part’s burden the earth cannot sustain
me.
If such a simple piece of land could be a place of calm
repose,
I’m sure my heart, alas, before such a repose in men would
be filled with anxiety.
Akhbâr 12:
“Only the state of madness permits me to proclaim You Holy.”
Akhbâr 30:
“The attainment of union is both abyss and joy, and the ensuing separation both
release and destruction. One swings back and forth between two inspirations,
one clinging to the veils of Timelessness, the other foundering in the sea of
nothingness.”
Akhbâr 36:
“O people! When al-Haqq (God) takes possession of a heart, He empties it
of all else but Himself; and when He keeps a man for Himself, He ruins him for
all else but Himself. When He lovingly desires a servant, He incites His other
servants to enmity against him, so as to bring him closer to Himself.”
Dîwân (ed.
L.M., Journal Asiatique, Paris, 1931) Muqatta‘ât no. 4, 1.4: “And
even if, in the shadow, abandonment seizes you, move out into the light of the
heart’s peace.”
Ibid, Al. 6
(to his friend and disciple Ibn ‘Atâ’, who like Nûrî believed the way to union
with God was through fraternal love): “I have written you, without writing you,
for I have written to my Spirit {Ruh}, without drafting a letter. To the
Spirit, nothing can separate Him from those who love Him... There is no
separation between lovers, and so the letter is sent.”
Ibid., M.
10: “I have seen my Lord {rabbi} with the eye of my heart, and I said:
who are You. He said: You.”
(This most characteristic expression: ra’aytu rabbi bi
‘ayni qalbi fa qultu man anta qâlâ anta}
Ibid., M.
15-16: “I have tried to be patient, but how can I be when my heart is deprived
of my center?
Your Spirit is mixed with my spirit in drawing near and in
separation;
And now I am You. Your existence is mine, and this is my
wish {murâdi}.”
Ibid., M.
17, 1.2: “The reality of God {al-Haqq} is far beyond. The fate of one
who sees the reality of God is (far beyond); and the one who seeks it is
anguished.”
Ibid., M.
18, 1.1: “It is You who drives me mad with love, not my remembrance (in prayer)
of You.”
Ibid., M.
19: “As for the ecstatic states of al- Haqq, it is al-Haqqwho
causes all of them, whatever the wisdom of the masters leads them by way of
self-renunciation to think.”
Ibid., M.
21, 1.2 (partial): "... the breath of the Spirit breathes in my skin, my
thought...”
Ibid., M.
24, 1.1: “Love as long it is hidden feels in danger, and it gains confidence
only when it faces (danger).”
Ibid., M30,
1.1-3: “You have shown so much of Yourself that it seems there is only You in
me.
I return my heart to those who are not You, but I see
between us only strangeness and familiarity between You and me.
Alas, here I am, in the prison of life, surrounded by all
men;
snatch me to Yourself away from my prison.”
Ibid., M.
31, 1.5: “If I could go to You, I would arrive crawling on my face or walking
on my head.”
Ibid., M.
32, 1.3: “His Spirit is my spirit, and my spirit is His Spirit; what He wants,
I want; and what I want, He wants.”
Ibid., M.
34, 1. 1-3: “I do not cease swimming in the seas of love, rising with the wave,
then descending; now the wave sustains me, and then I sink beneath it; love
bears me away where there is no longer any shore.”
Ibid., M.
35, 1.1: “Your place in my heart is my entire heart, nothing else has any
place.”
Ibid.,
M.41, 1.2: “One touches You, touches me.”
Ibid., M.
43, 1.2: “I have a heart which has eyes open to You and to all that is in Your
hand.”
The drama of Hallaj could be seen as a liebesdod of
the lover dying in the embrace of the Beloved, but for the fact that his love
is not eternalized through the tragic yearning of a broken heart, but is a
forestaste of a resurrection he has witnessed already with his Beloved “in
solitudes (where He is) present though He is concealed. “(Dîwân, M. 11)
Resigned to death, believing profoundly in the
resurrection, Hallaj wrote the following ode (Dîwân, ed. L.M.., pp.
31-35; ed. K.M. ash-Shaibi, Baghdad, 1974, no. 14), which proposes the thesis
of tadmin, germinal burial from which springs one’s resurrection:
So kill me now, my faithful friends
For in my killing is my life.
My death would be to live,
My life would be to die.
To me removal of my self
Would be the noblest gift to give
And my survival in my flesh
The ugliest offense, because
My life has tired out my soul
Among its fading artifacts.
So kill me, set aflame
My dried out bones, And when you pass by my remains In
their deserted grave,
You will perceive the secret of my Friend In the inmost
folds of what survives.
One moment I’m a shaykh Who holds the highest rank, And
then I am a little child Dependent on a nurse Or sleeping in a box Within the
brackish earth.
My mother gave her father birth, Which was a marvel I
perceived, And my own daughters whom I made Became my sisters in this way to
me, Not in the world of time Nor through adulteries.
So gather all the parts together Of the glowing forms Or
air and fire And pure water
And sow them in unwatered soil;
Then water it from cups Of serving maids And flowing
rivulets;
And then, when seven days have passed, A perfect plant will
grow.
REPRISE
WHO WAS HALLAJ AND WHAT
IS HIS PLACE
IN ISLAMIC MYSTICISM?
Born in 244/858 in SW Persia near a village called Bayda,
the grandson of a Zoroastrian convert to Islam, the son of a hallaj, a
man who earned his living as a woolcarder, a trade probably practised for a
short time by Husayn ibn Mansûr “al-Hallâj” (the carder or reader of the
secrets of the heart), a sobriquet he received from disciples met during his
travels from Iraq through Iran and beyond to India, he was three times a pilgrim
to Mecca; he wrote poetry and prose in Arabic of an intense direct spiritually
experiential nature; he was monogamous and the father of three sons and a
daughter.
He was trained as a child and early teenager in Hanbalite,
strict Sunnite traditionalist, schools in SW Iran, from which he ventured to
find spiritual teachers who could guide him to the more esoteric, inner
meanings of the Qur’an than could or at least in his mind did his Hanbalite kuttâb
teachers: first to Tustar, then into Iraq to Basra, and finally Baghdad, the
great Muslim capital city, which he envisioned quite early as the site of his
eventual confrontation with religious and secular authorities and of his
martyrdom.
We know of him through histories of Baghdad, biographical
polemics against or apologetical portraits for him, poets’ collections, trial
accounts, literary sketches, sayings attributed to him by his contemporary and
later eyewitnesses or repeaters of events, ritual reenactments of his life,
street songs, folk evocations, or, in modern literary retellings, in Turkey,
Iran, India, Iraq, Lebanon and Egypt, through radio or stage plays or extended
narrative poems. He was a historically verifiable person, the subject of a
highly publicized trial, execution, and subsequent outburst of demonstrations
in cities from Cairo to Baghdad to Bukhara and Samarqand.
He was born into an age of resurfacing “Hellenism” in the
Near East, this time, moving from a declining Byzantium to an emerging Islam,
in its new cultural, economic, and political center of Baghdad, ca. 813 AD,
through the patronage of a new universalistically-minded Caliph, the son of the
fabled Hârûn ar-Rashîd, al-Ma’mûn, who enriched the incipient Iranian and Greek
learning translation center, Bayt al-hikma, instituted by his father, to
make it the highlighted instrument for diffusing Greek analytic methods of
inquiry and cultural manners and style and to position it as a beacon of
quasi-legitimacy against the Qur’anic based traditionalism preached by the ‘ulama
entrenched in Islam since the death of the Prophet in 632 AD. A new school
of thinkers, the so-called failasûf questioned the literal readings of
the Qur’an, pushing its possible metaphoric interpretations, and thus becoming
in effect a rival intellectual elite in the major cities of Islam. The
instituting of a mihna or inquisitional court by Ma’mûn further
intensified the atmosphere of dogmatic rivalries leading even to the enforced
proclamations of testaments of faith pro or contra the neo-Hellenists or, as
they were called, the separatists, the Mu‘tazilites, who enjoyed for his tenure
the protection of Caliphal authority. The notion of “orthodoxy” was reversed
after the death of Ma’mûn in 833 AD, and the traditionalists were once again or
still the established authority, and speculative philosophers the marginal questioners.
The traditionalists had several major concerns,
principally the affirmation of the Qur’an as a divine (not a Hellenistic
cultural) source (cf. the more separated modern liberal education inclusion of
the Bible as literature?); the guarding of the sacred through pious ritual
observance of the precepts of the Law; their own authoritative representation
of the Community, the so-called ijma‘ or consensus factor, in all
matters of Sacred Law and religious obligation; and the witnessing of Tawhid
against sectarian disunity. Theirs was a religious and political affirmation;
the two were inseparable in their minds, and remain so in extreme Sunnite and
Shi‘ite thinking despite different concepts of leadership election and elitism,
exoteric and esoteric readings of the sources, to this day. In the
traditionalists’ view the Mu‘tazila were dividers of the Community, relativists,
“detached” analysts, separatists, comparatists, not obedient practitioners of the
faith. They were in effect lackeys of foreign ideas and influences; their view
of traditionalists was equally biased: against pedants, intractable
literalists, conformist not imaginative thinkers, etc. The world into which
Hallaj was born, intellectually speaking, was a world of cross-currents
destined repeatedly for dramatic convergences.
Hallaj himself was seen by some as a representative of
both, practising the ritual devotions watched over by the one, yet at ease and
thus suspect by the one in the language and thought of the other. He moved
freely in virtually all circles, was recognized early as a serious spiritual
personality, was widely travelled, was considered “radical” from the time of
his youth when he demonstrated against the Caliphal authorities on behalf of
the Zanj salt field laborers condemned in southern Iraq o subhuman living
conditions and slave labour, a position he repeated on behalf of starving
Bedouins who stormed Basra and Baghdad desperate for food; and to the end his
life, he raised the outcry to God, the Truth, the Just, on behalf of sufferers
from injustice. His life, in this respect, was a consistent line, leading to
his trial and execution.
His supporters came from high and low stations in life, as
did his antagonists. Traditionalists for the most part, especially Hanbalites,
supported him as a true practitioner of the faith; the philosophers, save those
in Iran, opposed him. The major issue in the political arena of Baghdad that
led to his major issue in the political arena of Baghdad that led to his trial
and execution was his threat to law and public order, meaning to the Caliph’s
always fragile legitimacy and the power elites’ monopoly of public resources
and funds, both issues that raised the recurring question of authority and
challenged presumptive officials’ behavior, from both a traditionalist Sunnite
and a Shi’ite point of view.
In the minds of his followers, Hallaj stood as a witness
thus for the Community unity, the unity of ritual, the unity of the sacred, and
the Oneness of God.
B.
What is his place in Islamic mysticism?
Basing himself on a premise given by Ghazâlî (d. 505/1111),
Louis Massignon explained (Test. & Refl., NDU Press, 1989, p. 123)
“that the study of mysticism is not like the study of other disciplines such as
law, philosophy, and theology, in which it is sufficient to absorb through
hypothesis the fundamental axioms in order to reconstruct and even extend the
rational deductions implied in their premises. To understand mysticism one
must have experienced, and willingly, the trials and sufferings of the most
humble life. Junayd had said forcefully “we have not learned this science (of
mysticism) by means of ‘it is said’ (qîl wa qâl), but by privations and
separations from dear ones”: applied asceticism.
“It is this initiation in “mental scouring” which is the
axiom, not theoretical but practical, of mysticism.”
In the case of Hallaj, the subject of his major study (Passion),
the participation in suffering, in compassion unto substitution, the mystic
“offers his life, turned toward the qibla of Mecca for the annual pardon
of the Islamic Community: as a “present witness”, here and now, of “the Eternal
Witness.” (ibid, p. 128)
In the “school of mystics” there is a language and a method
of progressive states of soul and stage of ascent to be experienced. In this
sense, mysticism is a science. The anagogic lexicon is Qur’anic in its source
even if developed by synthetic fusing with “foreign” philosophy; the mystical
words are germs of faith and renewal to be acted upon, not treated as
abstractions or objects of casual reflection.
Ghazâlî’s ihya theme, like Hallaj’s earlier
testimony in blood, results not from philosophical speculation thus, but from
first-hand experience, a lived path. This is the “given” in placing Hallaj in
the tradition. Certain key ideas, though not unique to him, were given special
authenticity by him through his ultimate experience or selfsurrender,
beginning and ending with the present witness of the Eternal Witness, shâhid
ânî: initiated through desire to be one with God the Essential Desire ( ‘ishq
dhâtî) in a state of perfect unification in which one no longer remembers
one’s own name, ‘ayn al-jam , when Divine Nature (lâhut) mingles
with human nature (nâsût) in esctasy (wajd) of an informing and
transforming moment (waqt), that spiritual interruption in our ordinary
seemingly progressive or our circular time when the Divine point of unity, the Tawhîd,
is revealed and perceived.
One is possessed by, unable to be freed from, God (istilam)
; the heart (qalb) is attached to God alone (i‘tiqad) in the
ideal union of two souls (Ittihad an-nafsayn), thus ending painful
indeed agonizing separation (firdq) : through the power of love (hubb)
with the beloved (Habib). In that power of union with the real, one can
say anâ’l-Haqq without trace of ego or presumption: His individual and
unique existence, Huwa Huwa, is my existence, ani, in a complete
realization, haqiqa, of oneness, wahdat ash-shuhûd, known in
witnessing.
After such union, with its series of raptures, there is a
natural if melancholy spiritual exhaustion, requiring a convalescence (bard’an)
\ “I wish for my person a convalescence from Your love” (Arjû li-nafsi
bard’an min mahabbikum).
He entered the states of zuhd and sabr in the
time honored ascetical spirit of Hasan of Basra, tawakkul or abandonment
and complete trust in God in the manner of one of his spiritual guides
Muhâsibî, and mahabba with the yearning, shawq, for intimacy of
God of Râbi'a, to mention only the near archetypal figures of early Sufism. The
classic exponents of the intoxication, sukr, state in the practise of
mystical love, as mentioned earlier, were Bâyezîd, Nûrî, and the Egyptian
Dhû’l-Nûn.
The “science of hearts” theme, the ‘Um al- qulûb,
had been developed earlier by one of the first to teach mystical states and
stages, ahwdl wa maqamdt, the maternal uncle of Junayd, Sari1
as- Saqati (d. 253/867), a disciple of Muhâsibî quoted by Hujwîrî (RAN, Kashf,
p. Ill) as saying “Love is the vision of Him in hearts;” and like Muhâsibî and
Junayd in that sequence down to Hallaj, he believed in the knowledge of the
secrets of the heart’s motions (al-‘ilm biharakat al-qulûb). Hallaj’s
constant reference to “the heart” was an established term for the self’s
center, my center = fawâdî, the place touched most deeply, indeed
wounded, by love, causing heart sickness, fear, anxiety.
Hallaj’s positions on fundamentals of Islamic teaching were
traditional and differed little if at all from other shaykhs of the time. His
disagreements with his early teachers, ‘Amr Makki and Sahl Tustari, were not
due to attitudes of praxis or asceticism or obedience to Law, but, according to
Hujwiri, to a kind of impulsiveness and sense of personal calling and need of
disengagement from control by the older shaykhs, which led him to “leave
without asking permission,” in each case; and eventually led him to reject any
long term association with established Sufism.
Two notes on Sahl and ‘Amr Makki: Sahl, directed
spiritually for a time by Dhû’l-Nûn Mîsrî, was anti-neo-Hellenist,
anti-Mu‘tazilite, strongly traditionalist, who believed in submission to the
State, and in the Qur’an as the primary recourse and balancer of mystics; a
rigid adherent to form and discipline.
‘Amr Makki initiated Hallaj into Sufism, gave the khirqa
and clipped his moustaches; a traditionlist pupil of Bukhari, the “sound” traditions
compiler along with Muslim; an allegorist author, he also wrote on Satan but
from the standpoint of the basic refusal to bow down thesis, without any
psychological interpretation. He regarded Hallaj as too oriented to direct and
immediate knowledge of God to remain with either of them.
In the case of Junayd, the difference on the question of Tawhid
seems to be one of degree of self-sublimation, of fanâ’ wa baqâ’, not of
the experiential principle; and spiritual knowledge, ma‘rifa, though
tied in Junayd to observance, ‘ibadât, as with Sahl and Makki, and
obedience to God’s command, amr, also included love and was verifiable Ji’l-qalb
in both. But ‘ ayn al-jairi was a transforming action sanctifying one,
in Hallaj, requiring the overt and total experience in order to escape the
timidity that can compromise the heart’s desire, a state he found paralyzing
the advocates of sobriety, sahw.
Shibli was closer still to Hallaj on the subject of love,
according to Hujwîrî: “Love obliterates from the heart all but the Beloved.”
But we add Hallaj’s special note from Dîwân M.17: “The realization of
God is given to one who craves it in anguish.”
In response to the seemingly outrageous expression anâ’l-Haqq,
whether he actually uttered it or not, Jalâl ad-Dîn Rûmî, d. 672/1273, is to be
considered as a voice in the controversy and dread that persist regarding
Hallaj down to the present day: to say anâ’ 1-Haqq is much humbler than
to say ‘Abd Allâh, for in the former there is no retaining of self to
assert distinction, whereas in the latter one affirms oneself as separate
indeed pretentiously as a servant.
Perhaps sophistry, but nevertheless spoken fraternally of
one lover of God by another.
The place of Hallaj in Islamic mysticism is assured by the
ongoing controversy surrounding his execution and fueled by any revival of
interest whether pro or con. His martyrdom seems frozen in time yet is thawed,
so to speak, by any retelling be it by poets or dogmatists. To some semisupporters
he was a truly pious man who went too far; to enthusiasts he was a sincere
triumphant lover of God; to modern “fundamentalists” in parts of the Arab
world, Pakistan, etc., he was a heretic who deserved to die as he did; to
liberal secularists, if they know of him at all, he was a social reformer way
ahead of his time. The research and published studies of the late Professor
Louis Massignon (d. 1962) of the Collège de France add enormous dignity and
prestige to any consideration of Hallaj. Indeed, in order to approach this
figure, his life and times, his civilization, his death, and his legacy, one
has to begin with the body of Massignon’s major and minor works. It is a unique
factor in the history of Western orientalism, and is based heavily on the
immense erudition of this modern French scholar, but even more on his own
personal presence and aura of piety, which, in its Catholic Christian form,
carried him to a profound sense of correspondence, beyond academic study, with
the Muslim mystical tradition in general and with Hallaj in particular.
Further, many distinguished Muslim scholars and writers see in Massignon an
Abrahamic co-religionist and a major contributor to world understanding and appreciation
of their civilization. To seriously denounce Hallaj in order to rid the
civilization of an apparent scandal, one that God Himself could not possibly
have allowed to happen, one must chip away at Massignon’s research, which has
of course begun in certain circles and from different motives and perspectives:
all of which adds to keeping Hallaj “alive”. This is a separate literature in
itself, however, and far from the range and purpose of this present brief
review.
Many scholars, Muslim and Western, include Hallaj in their
own studies of Islamic mysticism, with due acknowledgment given to the work of
Massignon. Prior to this work, begun in 1907 and completed with the posthumous
publication of his Passion d’al-Hallaj in 1975 in its enlarged second
edition, Hallaj was virtually unknown though included in most manuals and
memorials of Sufism within the Muslim world. It is not an exaggeration to say
that Hallaj through Massignon was instrumental in communicating the universal
quality of Islamic mysticism to those outside his civilization. And this
quality continues to enlarge its range of admirers and adherents in our time.
This page intentionally left blank
The following are personal evocations of Hallaj, his
disciples, and his martyrdom, included here merely as one further response to
his presence. They are reprinted with permission of Notre Dame University
Press, Indiana, and the journal SUFI of London.
AFTER HALLAJ
“If you are seized
by the shadow,
of the heart’s peace.”*
If you are lost
and wonder who you are, Listen as the Beloved
Tells you: I am you.
You will forget your name
and where you’re from;
You will know only
you are no one, found
Not by someone who
will boast and count
The many rescues he has made.
But
by the Only One
who tells you nothing
And guides in hiddenness to His source of Love.
A blood rose may be thrown by someone at your heart:
An emblem of your now- forgotten separation.
*from Hallaj’s Dïwàn, M.4, 1.4
SHIBLI*
That
I remained
Beneath the cupola of poets Or in the zawiya of saints.
In
fact, I was afraid
Of
being put with either;
And
that is why I feigned
With bursts of rhetoric and song My half-wit acts of joy
and pain, And let myself be put away Inside the maristan.
I was afraid of being merely all Alone with my beloved One,
Like someone else. I was afraid
Of dying young or old. And that is why I threw a rose when
he was on his cross Performing his ablution in his blood.
Ours were the acts of lovers Mad with love.
Only my madness saved me,
While his reason brought him death.
*from Hujwîrî, Kashf
THE DEATH OF AL - HALLAJ *
HALLAJ
They are
analogous to the spirit and reason, To divine inspiration and human expiration.
He gives us consciousness within our heart, And we become with Him the
One Who gives us life.
I was a
corpse He reclothed as a body.
We each
are His epiphanies, we see
In each
of us the presence He has made;
The
action He has given us, the life.
His
whole creation is aglow with life.
And we
respond to it through what’s alive In us. I was in ecstasy last night Embracing
and embraced by Him, as one
Small
residue of life. When I am gone I know He’ll breathe into my heart again.
(Pauses)
Let us
rest from words.
IBN ATA
No,
master,-I cannot let you stop.
There
isn’t time.
(from pp. 37-38) HALLAJ
Immersion
is what God requires of us, Not prudence or restraint. He is the sea And
signals us to lose ourselves in Him. We are poor swimmers and the undertow Is
frightening, but the water’s edge Attracts us breathless. We go to the sea To
draw its steady breathing, like the Camel at the well, to replenish ourselves.
We must conquer our fear, we must plunge much Deeper, for God is deeper than
water.
(from pp. 56-57) IBN ATA
Will I
see you again, master?
HALLAJ
Yes,
when I am on the esplanade. We may not have a chance to speak, But don’t be
afraid nor try to join me.
For your
way is yours, don’t imitate mine.
You’ll
find your way.
IBN
ATA
When,
master?
HALLAJ
When in
a crowd or alone you perceive Impatience disappearing, and you know Just where
you are and where You’re meant to be.
IBN
ATA
Where is
that, master?
HALLAJ
Anywhere.
You will know your action.
You are
present there, not thinking of somewhere else you ought to be.
IBN
ATA
I am
afraid without you, master, Not hearing your words.
Can you
bequeath me a maxim
To hold
and live by in your absence?
HALLAJ
Only to
subdue yourself or yourself Will subdue you. I am not afraid for you, And don’t
be afraid of being labelled strange. There is a freedom in strangeness.
Exposure
frees us from anxiety. • You must leave now.
The
jailor is upset by long farewells.
(from pp. 58-60)
HAMD
NARRATING
On the
morning of the execution He was taken from his prison, Put on one of the pack
mules, Led away, jostled by grooms Who ran alongside him
Shouting
at the crowd which formed A mob. The commissioner, Afraid himself of being
killed Or of someone killing his prisoner, Said: “This is not Hallaj, Hallaj is
in the Palace of Vizirs.” While Hamid’s mounted guard Escorted him, the
commissioner, To the esplanade, near the Khurasani Gate, on the West Bank of
the Tigris Where the gibbet was set up. Everyone who lived in Baghdad And
hundreds of foreign visitors To the City of Peace were there. Never had such a
crowd formed To witness an execution.
The guards
lifted him from the mule And he began dancing in his chains.
The
guards were shocked, the people Who could see burst into nervous laughter, And
then they led him to the gibbet. They tore the clothes from his back And began
the ordered flagellation.
“Now
Constantinopole is taken!” he shouted, At the five hundredth lash. He fainted
And the commissioner ordered The flagellation stopped
Lest he
die without suffering
The full
prescribed punishment.
The
guards had been ordered to close their ears Lest they be seduced to show him
mercy.
Once the
lashes had been stopped
The
executioner cut off one of his hands And then a foot, and then the other hand
Followed as prescribed by the other foot. He then was hoisted on the gibbet in
display. The air was filled with screams.
The
commissioner ordered the decapitation Postponed until the morning
So the
vizir, Hamid, could be present.
That
night his friends and enemies Came to him, challenging him To answer for
himself. Looters
Roamed
the city, setting fire to shops.
Baghdad
was convulsed with rioting.
He cried
out to God: “O my Friend, my Friend....” His disciples came... and said
To the
gibbet: “Have we not forbidden you To receive a guest, neither angel nor man!”
One threw a rose at my father, Who raised his bloody stump And wiped his cheek
Where it had struck him.
Life
ebbed from him
And he
could barely speak. In the morning Hamid came. He had ordered the official
witnesses At the trial scattered through the crowd To cry out: “This is for the
salvation Of Islam. Let his blood fall on our necks!” Advancing toward the
gibbet Hamid drew From his sleeve a scroll which he handed To the commissioner
to unroll.
The
latter handed it back to him. It had
The
names of eighty-four learned men on it, The legal scholars and Koran reciters,
Attesting to his heresy. A placard Was raised that later would be pinned To his
head, saying “this is the head Of the blasphemous conniver and deceiver Husayn
Ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, One whom God has put to death At the hands of Caliph
al-Muqtadir
After
proof was given showing that he claimed The sovereignty of God himself.
Glory be
to God, who causes his blood
To be
shed and led him to be cursed.” The crowd shouted: God is great!
Hamid
then called for the witnesses To reenact the trial, as was prescribed, Arguing
the pros and cons and finally Concurring with the statement read. Hamid then
asked: “The Caliph is innocent Of his blood?” They shouted “Yes!”
“The
commissioner is innocent of his blóod?” “Yes. Let his blood fall on our necks!”
Then Hamid
returned the scroll to his sleeve And lowered his right hand. The executioner
Stepped forward and the guards took My father down. As he was being lowered He
cried out “the ecstatic
Wants
only to be alone with his Only One.” The executioner beheaded him.
His body
was wrapped in his mantle And doused with oil and set aflame Together with his
books
The
sellers had been ordered to bring forth. One half-crazed disciple came forward
And pushed at the coals with his stick, Saying to them “Speak!”
Some
said “Like Jesus he could not die.
Another
took his place.”
And
others said he stole the word God gave him To keep in secret and used it to
exalt himself. And that is why he was put to death.
The
ashes were taken up and thrown From a minaret into the Tigris.
(from pp. 76-81)
*Excerpts
from THE DEATH OF AL-HALLAJ
Notre
Dame University Press, Indiana, 1979.
VII
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Arnaldez, Roger. Hallaj ou la religion de la
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‘Alî ibn ‘Isâ (d. 334/946), 20, 23, 25
‘Attâr,
Farîduddîn (d. 617/ 1220), 30, 46, 67-68
Bal ‘amî,
Abû’l-Fadl (d. 329/ 940), 24-25
Bâyezîd
Bistâmî, Tayfûr ibn ‘Isâ (d. 261/874), 36, 67, 82
Dhû’l-Nûn
Misrî, Thaubân ibn Ibrâhîm (d. 245/ 859), 36, 66, 82-83
Ghazâlî, Abû
Hâmid al- (d. 505/1111), 80-81
Hamd, son of
Hallaj, 12, 23, 27, 31, 93
Hâmid, M. ibn
al-‘Abbâs (d. 311/923), 20-21, 2327, 32, 93-96
Hanbalites, 20, 26, 49-50
Hasan of Basra
(d. 110/728), 2-4, 7-8, 33, 41, 44
Hujwîrî, ‘Alî
ibn ‘Uthmân (d.464/1071),66,68, 82, 84, 90
Iblîs, Satan, 21-22, 55-61, 84
Ibn ‘Arabî,
Muhyîddîn M. (d. 638/1240), 51
Ibn ‘Atâ’, Abû’l-‘Abbâs
(d. 309/922), 26-27, 36, 90-92
Ibn Dâwûd, Abû
Bakr M. (d. 297/909), 16, 18
Ibn Fâtik,
Ibrâhîm (d. before 348/959), 29
Ibn Khaldûn,
‘Abdû’r- Rahmân (d. 808/1406), 43-44
Ibn Surayj,
Abû’l-‘Abbâs Ahmad (d. 305/917), 16, 18, 20
Ibn Taymîya,
Ahmad (d. 728/ 1328), x, 34, 50-53
Jesus, 11, 17
Junayd,
Abû’l-Qâsim M. al- (d. 298/910), 3,8,35,67,
Karnabâ’î,
Hallaj’s in-laws, 5, 9
al-Khadir,
archetypal mystic guide, 11
The Mahdî, 6, 10, 20
Makkî, ‘Amr
ibn ‘Uthmân (d. 297/909), 3, 8-9, 61,
Muhammad,
Prophet (d. 11/ 632), 4, 53, 64
Muhâsibî,
al-Hârith ibn Asad al-(d. 243/857), 3,15,82 al-Muqtadir, Caliph (re. 296/
908-320/932), 19-20, 24- 25
al-Mu‘tadid,
Caliph (re, 279/ 892-290/902), 14-15
Mu'tazilites,
10, 12, 48, 50, 65, 77-78, 83
Nûrî,
Abû’l-Husayn an- (d. 295/907), 14, 36, 56, 82
Qarmathians, 10, 14, 21
Qushûrî, Nasr
(d. 316/928), 23-27
Râbi'a
al-‘Adawiyya (d. 185/ 801), 15, 44, 82
Rûmî, Maulana
Jalâluddîn (d. 672/1273), x, 46, 82
Saqatî, Sari*
as- (d 253/867), 82
Sarrâj, Abû
Nasr as- (d. 378- 988), 68
Shaghab,
mother of Caliph at Muqtadir (d. 321/ 933), 18, 20, 24, 27
Shalmaghânî,
Abû’l-Ja‘far (d. 322/933), 33
Shiblî, Abû
Bakr ibn Jahdar ash-(d. 334/945), 14,31, 37, 89
Sulamî, Abû
‘Abdu’r-Rahmân as- (d. 412/1021). 31, 68
Tabarî, Abû
Ja'far M. ibn Jarîr (d. 310/923), 26
Tirmidhî, M. ibn ‘Ali al- Hakîm (d. 321/932), 36
Tustarî, Ibn ‘Abdallâh Sahl at- (d. 283/896), 2, 83-84
Zanj, 5, 7, 12, 18, 79
abnâ’ ad-dunyâ, 9 akhbâr, ix-x, 69-72 anwârî
thâtîhi, 1 ‘asabiyya, 44-45, 47 al-asrâr, al-qulûb, 12 ‘ayn al-jam‘, 81, 84
fanâ’ wa baqâ', 41, 67, 84 fatwâ, 16, 20, 51-52
fawâdî, 83
firâq, 82
hajj, 33, 52
hallâj,
al-Hallâj, xi-xii, 1, 12, 31, 36, 77
haqq, al-Haqq,
haqîqa, Anâ’l- Haqq, 27, 33, 70-72, 82, 85
‘ibâda, 55, 84
ilhâm, 8, 16, 36
‘ilm al-qulûb,
qalb, 12, 65, 81-84
infïrâd, 22
‘ishq dhâtî, 15, 81
istighrâq, 38
istilâm, 81
i'tiqâd, 81
ittihâd an-nafsayn, 81
kâfir, 17 al-kahf, 47
kashf, 65-66 khawf wa huzn, 8 khirqa, 84
Lâhût wa nâsût, 81
mahabba, hubb,
Habib, 15, 62, 82
ma‘rifa, ‘ïrfân, 60, 66 mudda‘î, 8
makr, 27
Rûh, ar-, 71
sabr, 82
sahw wa sukr, 36, 82, 84 sayha bi’l-Haqq, 7, 46
shâhid ânî, shawâhid, shuhûd, 16, 26, 64, 81-82
shath, shathîyât, 16, 46, 66-67 suliba, 31
tâ‘a, 55
talâsha, 1
ta‘rîf, 17
tawakkul, 66, 82
Tawâsîn,
Tâ’Sîn al-Azal, xiii, 21, 23, 56-61, 64
Tawhîd, 52, 56, 63 78, 81, 84
‘Umra, 7
‘uyûb an-nafs, 29
wajd, 81
waqt, awqât, 22, 81
zandaqa, 15, 51
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