Title: Islamic Mystic and Martyr al Hallaj

Categories: Images

Icon Number: 127

The Passion of Al-Hallāj

MYSTIC AND MARTYR OF ISLAM

HALLĀJ was indeed a historical person, condemned to death in 922 of our era following a political trial, a cause célèbre, of which there survive fragments of hostile accounts that are, by the very fact of their hostility, testaments of his historical authenticity. He has survived also as a hero of legend. Even now in Islamic countries people remember him and represent him as an itinerant worker of miracles, sometimes as a man madly in love with God, sometimes as a charlatan. In Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan, where the wide diffusion of great Persian poems took place, poetry has stylized the character of this saint, the deified ecstatic, whom they call “Mansur Hallāj”.

It was he who, from the height of the gibbet, uttered the apocalyptic cry that announces the Judge of the Last Judgment:. Anat-t Iaqq, I am the Truth.

So writes Louis Massignon in the preface to the 1922 edition of his magisterial study – “The Passion of al-Hallāj”