Mansour al-Hallaj (), also known as Mansour Hallaj (; – 26 March 922; – 309 AH), was a Muslim mystic, poet, preacher, and teacher of Sufism, and one of the most controversial figures in Islamic history.John Arthur Garraty, Peter Gay, The Columbia History of the World, Harper & Row, 1981, p. 288, . During his lifetime he attracted a large popular following and was acclaimed as a saint by many ordinary believers, while Muslim jurists condemned him as a heretic. Most of his contemporary Sufis likewise disapproved of his actions, although he later became a major figure in the Sufi tradition.
Al-Hallaj was associated with the doctrine of fanāʾ, the extinction of individual consciousness, and with ideas described as ḥulūl, or union and identity with God. His mystical teaching sought to overcome the perceived gulf between the human being and God, expressing the relationship between the mystic and the divine in terms of an intimate union of lover and beloved. His most famous utterance, anā al-Ḥaqq ("I am the Truth"), was interpreted by many as a claim to divinity, while others understood it as an expression of the annihilation of the individual ego in which God, rather than the individual self, speaks through the mystic. To contemporary jurists, however, such teaching appeared blasphemously incompatible with the Islamic doctrine of tanzīh, the transcendence of God, and was also perceived as potentially threatening to the social order.
According to tradition, al-Hallaj was also known as Ḥallāj al-asrār, the "Carder of Consciences", because he was believed capable of discerning the secret thoughts of others. He deliberately taught a path of mystical union with God in opposition to what he regarded as the excessively dry and law-bound theology of his age. As a powerful public preacher, he was capable of moving audiences deeply and presented mystical experience as a condition in which the self is overwhelmed by divine presence and can no longer regard itself as autonomous from God.
Al-Hallaj spent many years teaching and travelling extensively through Central Asia and India. He eventually became implicated in political struggles at the Abbasid court, was arrested and subjected to a prolonged period of imprisonment, and was ultimately executed in Baghdad on religious and political charges in 922. His execution was brutal, and later Sufi tradition came to regard him as a pre-eminent mystical martyr. Accounts of his final words portray him as accepting his own fate while asking forgiveness for those responsible for his death and interpreting his execution as the culmination of the mystic's longing for complete solitude with God.
His only surviving work is Kitāb al-Tawāsīn, is dated to 902 CE. It contains the celebrated formula anā al-Ḥaqq, "I am the Truth", whose meaning in the work is presented in the context of divine signs and mystical participation in the Truth rather than simply as an unqualified assertion of personal divinity. His teachings, execution, and subsequent reinterpretation made him one of the most enduring and disputed symbols of ecstatic mysticism in the Sufi tradition.
Life
Early years Al-Hallaj was born around 858 in Pars Province of the Abbasid Empire to a cotton-carder (Hallaj means "cotton-carder" in Arabic) in an Arabized town called al-Bayḍā'. His grandfather was a Zoroastrian magus. His father moved to a town in Wasit famous for its school of Quran reciters. Al-Hallaj memorized the Qur'an before he was 12 years old and would often retreat from worldly pursuits to join other mystics in study at the school of Sahl al-Tustari. During this period al-Hallaj lost his ability to speak Persian and later wrote exclusively in Arabic. Al-Hallaj was a Sunni Muslim.
When he was twenty, al-Hallaj moved to Basra, where he married and received his Sufi habit from 'Amr Makkī, although his lifelong and monogamous marriage later provoked opposition from the latter. Through his brother-in-law, al-Hallaj found himself in contact with a Zaydi Shi'i clan that supported the Zanj Rebellion.
Al-Hallaj later went to Baghdad to consult the famous Sufi teacher Junayd of Baghdad, but he was tired of the conflict that existed between his father-in-law and 'Amr Makkī and set out on a pilgrimage to Mecca, against the advice of Junayd, as soon as the Zanj Rebellion was crushed.
Pilgrimages and travels
In Mecca, he made a vow to remain for one year in the courtyard of the sanctuary in fasting and total silence. When he returned from Mecca, he laid down the Sufi tunic and adopted a "lay habit" in order to be able to preach more freely. At that time a number of Sunnis, including former Christians who would later become viziers at the Abbasid court, became his disciples, but other Sufis were scandalized, while some Muʿtazilis and Shias who held high posts in the government accused him of deception and incited the mob against him. Al-Hallaj left for eastern Iran and remained there for five years, preaching in the Arab colonies and fortified monasteries that housed volunteer fighters in the jihad, after which he was able to return and install his family in Baghdad.
Al-Hallaj made his second pilgrimage to Mecca with four hundred disciples, where some Sufis, his former friends, accused him of sorcery and making a pact with the jinn. Afterwards he set out on a long voyage that took him to India and Turkestan beyond the frontiers of Islamic lands. About 290/902 he returned to Mecca for his final pilgrimage clad in an Indian loin-cloth and a patched garment over his shoulders. There he prayed to God to be made despised and rejected, so that God alone might grant grace to Himself through His servant's lips.
Imprisonment and execution
After returning to his family in Baghdad, al-Hallaj began making proclamations that aroused popular emotion and caused anxiety among the educated classes. These included avowing his burning love of God and his desire to "die accursed for the Community", and statements such as "O Muslims, save me from God" ... "God has made my blood lawful to you: kill me". It was at that time that al-Hallaj is said to have pronounced his famous shath "I am the Truth". He was denounced at the court, but a Shafi'i jurist refused to condemn him, stating that spiritual inspiration was beyond his jurisdiction.
Al-Hallaj's preaching had by now inspired a movement for moral and political reform in Baghdad. In 296/908 Sunni reformers made an unsuccessful attempt to depose the underage caliph al-Muqtadir. When he was restored, his Shi'i vizier Hamid ibn al-Abbas unleashed anti-Hanbali repressions which prompted al-Hallaj to flee Baghdad, but three years later he was arrested, brought back, and put in prison, where he remained for nine years.
The conditions of al-Hallaj's confinement varied depending on the relative sway his opponents and supporters held at the court, but he was finally condemned to death in 922 on the charge of being a Qarmatian rebel who wished to destroy the Kaaba, because he had said "the important thing is to proceed seven times around the Kaaba of one's heart." According to another report, the pretext was his recommendation to build local replicas of the Kaaba for those who are unable to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. The queen-mother interceded with the caliph who initially revoked the execution order, but the intrigues of the vizier finally moved him to approve it. On 23 Dhu 'l-Qa'da (March 25) trumpets announced his execution the next day. The words he spoke during the last night in his cell are collected in Akhbar al-Hallaj.Thousands of people witnessed his execution on the banks of the Tigris River. He was first punched in the face by his executioner, then lashed until unconscious, and then decapitated or hanged. Witnesses reported that al-Hallaj's last words under torture were "all that matters for the ecstatic is that the Unique should reduce him to Unity", after which he recited the Quranic verse 42:18. His body was doused in oil and set alight, and his ashes were then scattered into the river. A cenotaph was "quickly" built on the site of his execution, and "drew pilgrims for a millennium" until being swept away by a Tigris flood during the 1920s.
Some question whether al-Hallaj was executed for religious reasons as has been commonly assumed. According to Carl W. Ernst, the legal notion of blasphemy was not clearly defined in Islamic law and statements of this kind were treated inconsistently by legal authorities. In practice, since apostasy was subsumed under the category of zandaqa, viewing heresy as a political crime, they were prosecuted only when it was politically convenient. Sadakat Kadri points out that "it was far from conventional to punish heresy in the tenth century," and it is thought he would have been spared execution except that the vizier of caliph al-Muqtadir wished to discredit "certain figures who had associated themselves" with al-Hallaj. (Previously al-Hallaj had been punished for talking about being at one with God by being shaved, pilloried and beaten with the flat of a sword, not executed because the Shafi'ite judge had ruled that his words were not "proof of disbelief.")
Teachings and practices Al-Hallaj addressed himself to popular audiences encouraging them to find God inside their own souls, which earned him the title of "the carder of innermost souls" (ḥallāj al-asrār). He preached without the traditional Sufi habit and used language familiar to the local Shi'i population. This may have given the impression that he was a Qarmatian missionary rather than a Sufi. His prayer to God to make him lost and despised can be regarded as typical for a Sufi seeking annihilation in God, although Louis Massignon has interpreted it as an expression of a desire to sacrifice himself as atonement on behalf of all Muslims. When al-Hallaj returned to Baghdad from his last pilgrimage to Mecca, he built a model of the Kaaba in his home for private worship.
Al-Hallaj was popularly credited with numerous supernatural acts. He was said to have "lit four hundred oil lamps in Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre with his finger and extinguished an eternal flame in a Zoroastrian fire temple with the tug of a sleeve."
Among other Sufis, al-Hallaj was an anomaly. Many Sufi masters felt that it was inappropriate to share mysticism with the masses, yet al-Hallaj openly did so in his writings and through his teachings. This was exacerbated by occasions when he would fall into trances which he attributed to being in the presence of God.
Hallaj was also accused of ḥulūl "incarnationism", the basis of which charge seems to be a disputed verse in which the author proclaims mystical union in terms of two spirits in one body. This position was criticized for not affirming union and unity strongly enough; there are two spirits left whereas the Sufi fana' texts speak of utter annihilation and annihilation in annihilation (the annihilation of the consciousness of annihilation), with only one actor, the deity, left.Sells, Michael Anthony. 1996. Early islamic mysticism: Sufi, Qurʼan, miraj, poetic and theological writings. New York: Paulist Press. Saer El-Jaichi has argued "that in speaking of the unity with the divine in terms of ḥulūl, Hallaj does not mean the fusion (or, mingling) of the divine and human substances." Rather, he has in mind "a heightened sense of awareness that culminates in the fulfillment of a spiritual – super-sensory – vision of God’s presence."Early Philosophical Sufism: The Neoplatonic Thought of Ḥusayn Ibn Manṣūr al-Ḥallāğ. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press.
Edward Said succinctly described al-Hallaj as "quasi-Christlike."