Became a sword and appeared in the hand of ʿAlī and became the Slayer of the time.
No! no! for ’twas even He that was crying in human shape, ‘Ana ’l-Haqq.’
That one who mounted the scaffold was not Mansūr,[23] though the foolish imagined it.
Rūmī hath not spoken and will not speak words of infidelity: do not disbelieve him!
Whosoever shows disbelief is an infidel and one of those who have been doomed to Hell.”
[23] Hallāj is often called Mansūr, which is properly the name of his father.
Although in Western and Central Asia—where the Persian kings were regarded by their subjects as gods, and where the doctrines of incarnation, anthropomorphism, and metempsychosis are indigenous—the idea of the God-man was neither so unfamiliar nor unnatural as to shock the public conscience very profoundly, Hallāj had formulated that idea in such a way that no mysticism calling itself Mohammedan could tolerate, much less adopt it. To assert that the divine and human natures may be interfused and commingled,[24] would have been to deny the principle of unity on which Islam is based. The subsequent history of Sūfism shows how deification was identified with unification. The antithesis—God, Man—melted away in the pantheistic theory which has been explained above.[25] There is no real existence apart from God. Man is an emanation or a reflexion or a mode of Absolute Being. What he thinks of as individuality is in truth not-being; it cannot be separated or united, for it does not exist. Man is God, yet with a difference. According to Ibn al-ʿArabī,[26] the eternal and the phenomenal are two complementary aspects of the One, each of which is necessary to the other. The creatures are the external manifestation of the Creator, and Man is God’s consciousness (sirr) as revealed in creation. But since Man, owing to the limitations of his mind, cannot think all objects of thought simultaneously, and therefore expresses only a part of the divine consciousness, he is not entitled to say Ana ’l-Haqq, “I am God.” He is a reality, but not the Reality. We shall see that other Sūfīs—Jalāluddīn Rūmī, for example—in their ecstatic moments, at any rate, ignore this rather subtle distinction.
[24] Hulūl was not understood in this sense by Hallāj (Massignon, op. cit., p. 199), though the verses quoted on [p. 151] readily suggest such an interpretation. Hallāj, I think, would have agreed with Eckhart (who said, “The word I am none can truly speak but God alone”) that the personality in which the Eternal is immanent has itself a part in eternity (Inge, Christian Mysticism, p. 149, note).
[25] See [pp. 79 ff.]
[26] Massignon, op. cit., p. 183.