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.
[21] Kitāb al-Tawāsīn (Paris, 1913). See especially pp. 129-141.
“Glory to Him who revealed in His humanity (i.e. in Adam) the secret of His radiant divinity,
And then appeared to His creatures visibly in the shape of one who ate and drank (Jesus).”
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:
“Thy Spirit is mingled in my spirit even as wine is mingled with pure water.
When anything touches Thee, it touches me. Lo, in every case Thou art I!”
And again:
“I am He whom I love, and He whom I love is I: