Al-Hallaj Quotes on Love
Mansur al-Hallaj (c.858–922) — the Persian Sufi poet executed in Baghdad for his ecstatic public utterances, most famously “I am the Truth” (Ana al-Haqq) — gave classical Sufi poetry one of its most enduring statements of mystical love. The surviving fragments of the Diwan and the Tawasin develop love (ishq) as the consuming desire of the soul for the divine beloved — a love so total that the lover’s own existence is annihilated in the beloved, leaving only the divine self-utterance through the lover’s tongue. 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 statement of Sufi martyrdom for the love of God.
Quotes
-
“I am the Truth.”
Ana al-Haqq -
Attributed to Al-Hallaj:
“I have seen my Lord with the eye of my heart.”
-
Attributed to Al-Hallaj:
“Between me and Thee, there is only I; remove the I, and only Thou remains.”
-
Attributed to Al-Hallaj:
“Love is the closest companion of the seeker, even when it leads to the gallows.”
-
Attributed to Al-Hallaj:
“He who tastes the wine of divine love forgets every other taste.”
-
“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. -
“The beloved does not drink a single drop of water without seeing His Face in the cup. Allah is He Who flows between the pericardium and the heart, just as the tears flow from the eyelids.”
As quoted in Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1978) by Annemarie Schimmel