Stain Your Prayer Rug with Wine 205outrageous statements. Called “the Nourisher” by his disciples, al-
Hallaj first gained notoriety, not to mention the ire of the religious
authorities, by claiming that the Hajj was an internal pilgrimage that a
person of pure heart could perform anywhere. He further alienated
the Ulama by focusing the bulk of his teachings on Jesus, whom he con-
sidered to be a Hidden Sufi. For these declarations, he was condemned
as a fanatic and a “secret Christian.” But it was his intolerably heretical
claim to have achieved unity with the Divine that made al-Hallaj the
most famous, though by no means the only, Sufi martyr in history.
Although given numerous chances to recant during his eight years
of imprisonment, al-Hallaj refused. Finally, the Abassid Caliph al-
Muqtadir, under pressure from the religious authorities, sentenced
him to death. As a demonstration of the severity of his heresy, the
Caliph had al-Hallaj tortured, flogged, mutilated, and crucified; his
corpse was decapitated, his body dismembered, his remains burned,
and the ashes scattered in the Tigris River.
What did al-Hallaj mean? Was he actually claiming to be God? If
so, how can we reconcile Sufism as a legitimate sect of such a radically
monotheistic and fervently iconoclastic religion as Islam?
Many prominent Sufis roundly condemned al-Hallaj. Al-Ghazali,
perhaps the most important Muslim mystic in the history of Islam,
referred to al-Hallaj in his eleventh-century masterpiece, The Alchemy
of Happiness, as a “foolish babbler” whose death was “a greater benefit
to the cause of true religion.” Al-Ghazali did not criticize al-Hallaj for
claiming to have achieved a level of spiritual unification with God in
which his essence had merged with the essence of the Divine. What
he and others objected to was the fact that al-Hallaj had publicly dis-
closed what was meant to be a secret.
Having spent his life striving to harmonize Islamic mysticism with
Islamic orthodoxy (he was, incredibly, both a Sufi and a Traditionalist
Ash‘arite), al-Ghazali understood better than anyone that such eso-
teric knowledge must be revealed slowly and in stages. Just as “a child
has no real knowledge of the attainments of an adult,” and an unlet-
tered adult “cannot understand the attainments of a learned man,” so,
al-Ghazali wrote in Revival of the Religious Sciences, not even a learned
man can understand “the experiences of enlightened saints.”