The Mystics of Islam

No one can approach the subject of this chapter—the state of the mystic who has reached his journey’s end—without feeling that all symbolical descriptions of union with God and theories concerning its nature are little better than leaps in the dark. How shall we form any conception of that which is declared to be ineffable by those who have actually experienced it? I can only reply that the same difficulty confronts us in dealing with all mystical phenomena, though it appears less formidable at lower levels, and that the poet’s counsel of silence has not prevented him from interpreting the deepest mysteries of Sūfism with unrivalled insight and power.

Whatever terms may be used to describe it, the unitive state is the culmination of the simplifying process by which the soul is gradually isolated from all that is foreign to itself, from all that is not God. Unlike Nirvāṇa, which is merely the cessation of individuality, fanā, the passing-away of the Sūfī from his phenomenal existence, involves baqā, the continuance of his real existence. He who dies to self lives in God, and fanā, the consummation of this death, marks the attainment of baqā, or union with the divine life. Deification, in short, is the Moslem mystic’s ultima Thule.

In the early part of the tenth century Husayn ibn Mansūr, known to fame as al-Hallāj (the wool-carder), was barbarously done to death at Baghdād. His execution seems to have been dictated by political motives, but with these we are not concerned. Amongst the crowd assembled round the scaffold, a few, perhaps, believed him to be what he said he was; the rest witnessed with exultation or stern approval the punishment of a blasphemous heretic. He had uttered in two words a sentence which Islam has, on the whole, forgiven but has never forgotten: “Ana ’l-Haqq”—“I am God.”

The recently published researches of M. Louis Massignon[21] make it possible, for the first time, to indicate the meaning which Hallāj himself attached to this celebrated formula, and to assert definitely that it does not agree with the more orthodox interpretations offered at a later epoch by Sūfīs belonging to various schools. According to Hallāj, man is essentially divine. God created Adam in His own image. He projected from Himself that image of His eternal love, that He might behold Himself as in a mirror. Hence He bade the angels worship Adam (Kor. 2. 32), in whom, as in Jesus, He became incarnate.

Since the ‘humanity’ (nāsūt) of God comprises the whole bodily and spiritual nature of man, the ‘divinity’ (lāhūt) of God cannot unite with that nature except by means of an incarnation or, to adopt the term employed by Massignon, an infusion (hulūl) of the divine Spirit, such as takes place when the human spirit enters the body.[22] Thus Hallāj says in one of his poems:

This doctrine of personal deification, in the peculiar form which was impressed upon it by Hallāj, is obviously akin to the central doctrine of Christianity, and therefore, from the Moslem standpoint, a heresy of the worst kind. It survived unadulterated only amongst his immediate followers. The Hulūlīs, i.e. those who believe in incarnation, are repudiated by Sūfīs in general quite as vehemently as by orthodox Moslems. But while the former have unhesitatingly condemned the doctrine of hulūl, they have also done their best to clear Hallāj from the suspicion of having taught it. Three main lines of defence are followed:

(1) Hallāj did not sin against the Truth, but he was justly punished in so far as he committed a grave offence against the Law. He “betrayed the secret of his Lord” by proclaiming to all and sundry the supreme mystery which ought to be reserved for the elect.

(3) Hallāj meant to declare that there is no essential difference or separation between God and His creatures, inasmuch as the divine unity includes all being. A man who has entirely passed away from his phenomenal self exists quâ his real self, which is God.

The last explanation, which converts Ana ’l-Haqq into an impersonal monistic axiom, is accepted by most Sūfīs as representing the true Hallājian teaching. In a magnificent ode Jalāluddīn Rūmī describes how the One Light shines in myriad forms through the whole universe, and how the One Essence, remaining ever the same, clothes itself from age to age in the prophets and saints who are its witnesses to mankind.