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November 23, 2003
REVIEWS: Of Mansoor Hallaj
Marx calls religion “the heart of a heartless world” (Critique of Hegel’s Theory of Law). Subject to remorseless natural laws, mankind gradually understands and uses them to move away from its primeval state of helplessness. However, the individual, in his loneliness, is still helpless in the face of social forces. It is here that his religious belief can sustain him, counter his despair and give him the will to hope.
Sufism is an important aspect of man’s quest for a comprehension of his place in the cosmos and his anguished search for his rationale for existence. He refuses to accept that his existence can be absurd. That leads him to an attempt to “conceptualize God” and to place himself in the cosmos as part of that concept.
Sufistic movement has had two stages. The early sufism among the Muslims did not make a distinction between the spiritual and material lives, nor between shariat and tareeqat. It thus was a source of strength to the believers in both the spheres — spiritual and mundane. There was no dichotomy.
Later sufism, that of the Middle Ages, had to deal with a tired Muslim civilization, unable to desire solutions for its growing contradictions. Furthermore, an advancing Europe was threatening it with conquests. As a result, the later sufism reconciled the Muslims to defeat. Belief in religion turned from being a source of vigour to a means of escape from reality.
Hussain bin Mansoor Hallaj is situated between the two periods, in the ninth century. The Abbasid Empire had lost its momentum. But it was still a great power and still supported institutions of learning and culture. The Greek knowledge acquired under Mamoun had by now been internalized. It had provided a vital stimulus to the growth of learning in society. But it had also contributed to a certain ideological fragmentation, since the various social and political movements now expressed themselves in religio-philosophical terms.
Professor Lateefullah is emphatic in the book under review that Mansoor Hallaj did not adhere to the pantheistic view of sufism, which, according to him, became the dominant strand of sufism much later. It follows that Hallaj did not utter Anal Haq (I am God), the ostensible reason for his execution. Neither could he, holding a transcendental view of God. He was executed having been mistaken for one Hasan bin Mansoor, a Carmatian, whose views were extremely unorthodox, even un-Islamic.
However, the author quotes some great sufis who seem to view Hallaj’s way as containing some serious mistakes. Abu Bakr Shibli says that “a voice” told him in a dream on the night that Hallaj was killed that the latter had revealed a Divine secret, which he had been charged with guarding. Ali Hajveri says that some of Hallaj’s writings may have given an impression that was not intended. Shaikh Abdul Qadir Gilani believes that Hallaj had met with some difficulty in his understanding of sufism and had found no one to guide him. Thus all of them regard him as a good Muslim but imply that his execution, though plainly a miscarriage of justice in legal terms, was Divine retribution for his mistake in the spiritual field.
Syed Nomanul Haq, in his introduction to Hallaj’s Diwan, translated into Urdu by Muzaffar Iqbal, says that Mansoor Hallaj had got caught in the repression that followed an abortive attempt to overthrow the Abbasid Caliph Al-Muqtadir. However, he adds that Mansoor Hallaj had said in Shibli’s presence: “An al haq, wal haqqil haq-i- haq”, which is really spelling out the logical conclusion of the theory of unity of existence. In other words he had expressed what was meant to be esoteric. This is tantamount to what the Catholic Church classifies as Faire Scandle, i.e., revealing something which may be true in its proper context but may be misunderstood without it and thus cause confusion among the believers.
Mansoor Hallaj may have been killed for revealing a secret. But that “secret” became the dominant sufi trend a few centuries later with Ibn Arabi and Jalaluddin Rumi. No doubt, its origin is non-Arab and it is derived from neo-Platonism. But it rejects immanence with which it is sometimes confused, since immanence in its original Greek version assumes an uncreated universe.
However, it cannot be denied that the basic question of the relationship between the essence and appearance remained, though the theory of the unity of existence removed it from the general religious belief system of the masses. They may go to the Pirs or to their tombs to seek recovery from their illnesses. But the theory remains the guarded domain of the intellectuals. (How many of today’s Muslims even propose to read the “Futuhat”?) Secondly, sufi experience, being purely subjective, is not objectively verifiable. It is entirely esoteric and, therefore, pre-modern. Thus, while the religious belief may be the “heart of a heartless world’, organized sufism cannot claim to be that heart.
Hussain Bin Mansoor Hallaj: Ek Tahqeeqi Jaeza
Professor Lateefullah
Idara-i-Yadgar-e-Ghalib, Ghalib Library, 2nd Chowrangi, Nazimabad,
Karachi-74600
144pp. Rs 120
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