Abdal Hakim Murad - The Cambridge Companion to Islamic Theology

266 Toby Mayer
that God Himself spoke through the mystic in enigmas akin to the
ambiguities (mutashabihat) found in the Qur’an. Like the qur’anic
ambiguities, these locutions were to be accepted by the mass of believers
in good faith, leaving their interpretation to an elite. Thus, in Carl
Ernst’s words, they shockingly amounted to a virtual ‘‘supplementary
canon, formed by the uninterrupted contact which God maintains
with the elect’’. 33 The most famous ecstatic who brought such readings
of Sufism into the open, forcing the issue of their asymmetry with
exoterism, was undoubtedly Mans _
ur al-H _
allaj.
There had already been trials of Sufis under the Abbasids, notably
that of Abu’l-H _
usayn al-Nurı and his companions c. 878. Themystical
‘‘lover’’ Sumnun (d. 910) had fallen foul of certain authorities for his
amorous way of talking about God. Ah _
mad al-Kharraz (d. 899)wasexiled
from Baghdad at this time on account of his work The Secret (Kitab al-
Sirr), and later, after an eleven-year residence in Mecca, he found himself
expelled again. But it is clearly the furore centring on H _
allaj and his two
trials (913 and 922) under the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir, which marks
the moment when the tension most momentously broke surface.
What doctrines were specifically at stake in these persecutions? It
appears that the Nurı trial was founded on a vague allegation of zandaqa
(crypto-Manichean heresy). This was enough provocation for the
H _
anbalite jurist Ghulam al-Khalıl to persuade the authorities to have
him arrested and tried. For a figure like Khalıl, Nurı’s doctrine of divine
love suggested an outrageous intimacy between creature and God, and
implied an intolerable anthropomorphism. It is important, however, that
when questioned by the chief judge of Baghdad, Nurı spoke in particular
about the saints who ‘‘see by God and hear by God’’ (the idea of ittis _
af),
causing the judge to weep with emotion. The same principle was the
recurrent issue in the H _
allaj trials. In the first of these, the main charge
was that H _
allaj had claimed divine lordship for himself and taught
incarnationism (h _
ulul), by which the authorities concluded that the
wandering thaumaturge was posturing as a messianic figure (mahdı). 34
This was deeply threatening to the state at a time when the extremist
Shı‘ite movement known as Carmathianism was in the air. In the second
trial, although H _
allaj’s alleged replacement of the H _
ajj was decisive
in his condemnation from the point of view of orthopraxy, nevertheless
the vital issue from the viewpoint of orthodoxy was probably again
ittis _
af. It was the seizure of a text on this subject among H _
allaj’s
effects which initially provoked the caliph to hand him over for crossexamination,
and H _
allaj’s ‘‘thesis of [God’s] witness’’ (qawl bi’l-shahid)
was the subject of a special session during the proceedings. In this last
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