The Enigma of Hallaj

Abstract

One of the most forbidding images in the history of Islamic spirituality is the public execution of the great Muslim mystic Husayn bin Mansur Hallaj in 922. The punishment followed a long and well-publicized trial in which Hallaj was accused of sorcery and of attempting to overthrow the Islamic Shari‘ah. The sentence against Hallaj was singularly harsh. He was publicly flogged five hundred lashes, stoned by believers in the city square, and then raised on a cross where he was left bleeding for the night, his hands and feet having been amputated. The following morning he was beheaded, his trunk doused with fuel and set on fire and his ashes scattered in the Tigris River. His head was displayed in towns and districts as a warning to opponents of the State. Such shocking measures ensured that the execution and the circumstances that precipitated it would remain etched in human memory over the centuries through accounts of biographers, mystics, and historians. Herbert Mason’s Al- Hallaj is the latest addition to this vibrant trajectory. A professor of history and religion at Boston University, Mason has been conducting research on Hallaj for the past thirty years, a devotion he might have inherited from his former teacher Louis Massignon, the French scholar who started work on Hallaj’s thoughts and ideas in 1907, culminating in four volumes posthumously published in 1975 as Lapssion d’al-Hallaj. Mason translated this monumental work from French into English. His new book, a slim volume on perhaps the most celebrated and reviled mystic of all times, brims with power and insightperhaps as much for the author’s empathy for the “martyr of Love” as an attempt for mediating on the event’s inner meaning. The story of Hallaj, Mason notes, “is one of unhinging human self-assurance and spiritual selflessness. It remains an awesome mystery and guide across the ages for those who would pursue the truth of our ...