��204 No god but God
What is Sufism? It is the love of Majnun for Layla. It is “numberless
waves, lapping and momentarily reflecting the sun—all from the same
sea,” according to the Sufi master Halki. It is the practice of “adopting
every higher quality and leaving every lower quality,” in the words of
the Patriarch of Sufism, Ibn Junayd (d. 910). The Sufi is “not Chris-
tian or Jew or Muslim,” Rumi wrote. He is not of “any religion or cul-
tural system... not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or
up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of ele-
ments at all... not an entity of this world or the next.” He is, in Ishan
Kaiser’s description, “the actual temple of the fire worshipper; the
priest of the Magian; the inner reality of the crossed-legged Brahmin
meditating; the brush and the color of the artist.”
Drunk without wine, sated without food, a king beneath a humble
cloak, a treasure within a ruin, Sufism is to Islam what the heart is to
the human being: its vital center, the seat of its essence. It is, in Maj-
nun’s words, “the pearl hidden in the shell, the face beneath the veil.”
Sufism is the secret, subtle reality concealed at the very depths of the
Muslim faith, and only by mining those depths can one gain any
understanding of this enigmatic sect.
O NE SPRING MORNING in tenth-century Baghdad, the frenetic
but scrupulously controlled markets of the capital city were thrown
into a state of agitation when a raggedly dressed man named Husayn
ibn Mansur al-Hallaj—one of the earliest and most renowned Sufi
masters—burst onto the crowded square and exclaimed at the top of
his voice, Ana al-Haqq! “I am the Truth!” by which he meant, “I am
God!”
The market authorities were scandalized. They immediately
arrested al-Hallaj and handed him over to the Ulama for judgment.
The Ulama in Baghdad were already familiar with this controversial
Sufi master. Although born a Zoroastrian into a priestly (Magian) fam-
ily in southern Iran, al-Hallaj had converted to Islam and moved to
the Abassid capital of Baghdad at a fairly young age. An early disciple
of the legendary Sufi Pir, Tustari (d. 896), he had matured into a charis-
matic preacher known for performing miraculous deeds and making