Mystic · Medieval
Al-Hallaj
c. 858–922 · Early Baghdad Sufism of ecstatic love; a school of one
The Sufi martyr whose cry “I am the Truth” cost him his life in Baghdad; the Catholic Islamologist Louis Massignon gave forty years to him and saw in his death a Muslim shadow of the Cross.
Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, “the wool-carder,” left the sober Sufi masters of Baghdad to preach in the markets, traveled to India and Turkestan, and taught that love (ishq) is God's own essence and that the lover is so consumed that God speaks in him: “I am the Truth” (ana al-Haqq). He held that the pilgrimage and the rites have an inward fulfillment in the heart, which his accusers took as abolishing them, and in the “Tawasin” read even Iblis's refusal to bow before Adam as a tragic fidelity to the divine unity. He said that the religions are one root with many branches, prayed to be killed so that the community might be spared, and after a long trial was flogged, mutilated and crucified in 922, forgiving his executioners. Later Sufis made him the type of the one who said aloud what must be kept secret.
Why he matters: Massignon's four-volume “Passion of al-Hallaj,” the greatest work of Catholic Islamology, found in him a man who loved to the point of substitution for others, and out of that study came Massignon's Badaliya movement of Christians offering themselves for Muslims, which formed the Catholic attitude to Islam that Nostra Aetate expresses. He is the place where Islam itself raised the question of a God who suffers in His lover.
Where to be careful
“I am the Truth,” however glossed, voices an identity of creature and Creator that Lateran IV and the condemnation of Eckhart's propositions exclude, and his inward reading of the rites led where the Church also will not go, to the sufficiency of the interior act without the external worship. His Jesus is the model of sanctity, not the Word made flesh. Common ground: love as the heart of religion, the self emptied so that God may act, and a death freely accepted for others.
Reading
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Hallaj: Poems of a Sufi MartyrAl-Hallaj, trans. Carl W. Ernst · The surviving Diwan in English, with the lines on love, union and the one root of the religions.
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Hallaj: Mystic and MartyrLouis Massignon, trans. Herbert Mason · The one-volume abridgment of the “Passion”; the life, the trial and the death as a Catholic priest reconstructed them.
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The Tawasin of Mansur al-HallajAl-Hallaj, trans. Aisha Abd ar-Rahman · His short treatise on Muhammad, Iblis and the divine unity; difficult, and the source of the charge of heresy.
Documented positions
Where this thinker stands on each dispute the test covers.