206 No god but God
Al-Hallaj’s offense was not the sacrilege of his startling declara-
tion, but its imprudent disclosure to those who could not possibly
understand what he meant. Sufi teaching can never be revealed to the
unprepared or the spiritually immature. As al-Hujwiri (d. 1075)
argued, it is all too easy for the uninitiated to “mistake the [Sufi’s]
intention, and repudiate not his real meaning, but a notion which they
formed for themselves.” Even al-Hallaj admitted that his experience
of unity with God came after a long journey of inward reflection.
“Your Spirit mixed with my Spirit little by little,” he wrote of God in
his Diwan, “by turns, through reunions and abandons. And now I am
Yourself. Your existence is my own, and it is also my will.”
Therefore, to understand where al-Hallaj ended on this inward
journey, one must look back to where he began: at the first station on
the long and arduous path of spiritual self-reflection that Sufis call the
tariqah: the Way. The tariqah is the mystical journey that leads the
Sufi away from the external reality of religion and toward the divine
reality—the only reality—of God. As with all journeys, the Way has an
end, though it should not be imagined as a straight road leading to a
fixed destination but rather as a majestic mountain whose peak con-
ceals the presence of God. There are, of course, many paths to the
summit—some better than others. But because every path eventually
leads to the same destination, which path one takes is irrelevant. All
that matters is to be on a path, to be constantly moving toward the
top—one measured, controlled, and strictly supervised step at a
time—passing diligently through specific “abodes and stations” along
the Way, each of which is marked by an ineffable experience of spiri-
tual evolution, until one finally reaches the end of the journey: that
moment of enlightenment in which the veil of reality is stripped away,
the ego obliterated, and the self utterly consumed by God.
By far the most famous parable describing the Sufi Way and the sta-
tions that a disciple must pass through on the journey toward self-
annihilation was composed by the twelfth-century Iranian perfumer
and alchemist, Farid ad-Din Attar (d. 1230). In Attar’s epic master-
piece, The Conference of the Birds, the birds of the world have gathered
around the hoopoe (a mythical bird), who has been chosen by lot to
guide them on a journey to see the Simurgh: King of the Birds. Before