Al-Hallaj Quotes on God
Mansur al-Hallaj (c.858–922) — the Persian Sufi poet executed in Baghdad for his ecstatic public utterances — gave classical Sufi theology its most controversial statement of the soul’s relation to God in the famous declaration Anā al-Ḥaqq (I am the Truth, where al-Ḥaqq is one of the divine names of God). The central claim of the Tawasin is that the soul wholly given over to divine love attains a unitive condition in which the lover’s own self-existence is annihilated (fanāʾ) in the divine reality, leaving God to speak through the lover’s tongue — an interpretation distinguished by the later Sufi tradition from the heterodox doctrine of substantial union with God by the careful retention of the absolute distinction between Creator and creature. The framework, recovered for twentieth-century scholarship through Louis Massignon’s monumental La Passion d’al-Hallaj, shaped subsequent Sufi reflection through Ibn Arabi and Rumi and remains the principal classical Sufi statement of unitive mystical experience.
Quotes
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“I am the Truth.”
Ana al-Haqq -
Attributed to Al-Hallaj:
“I have seen my Lord with the eye of my heart.”
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Attributed to Al-Hallaj:
“Between me and Thee, there is only I; remove the I, and only Thou remains.”
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Attributed to Al-Hallaj:
“Love is the closest companion of the seeker, even when it leads to the gallows.”
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Attributed to Al-Hallaj:
“He who tastes the wine of divine love forgets every other taste.”
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“Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (1978) by Steven T. Katz, p. 92; four centuries later the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart would make a very similar assertion: "The eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and one sight , and one knowledge , and one love .”
I saw my Lord with the eye of my heart . He said, "Who are you?" I said, " I am You. " You are He Who fills all place But place does not know where You are. In my subsistence is my annihilation; In my annihilation, I remain You. -
“God , Most High, is the very one who Himself affirms His unity by the tongue of whatever of His creatures He wishes. If He Himself affirms His unity by my tongue, it is He and His affair. Otherwise, brother, I have nothing to do with affirming God's Unity.”
As quoted in Words of Ecstasy in Sufism (1985) by Carl W. Ernst, p. 45 Variant translation: Allah, Most High, is the very One Who Himself affirms His Unity by the tongue of whomsoever of His creatures He wishes. If He affirms His Unity in m