Mansur Al-Hallaj

Mansour al-Hallaj (Arabic: ابو المغيث الحسين بن منصور الحلاج, romanized: Abū 'l-Muġīth al-Ḥusayn ibn Manṣūr al-Ḥallāj), also known as Mansour Hallaj (Persian: منصور حلاج, romanized: Mansūr-e Hallāj; c. 858 – 26 March 922; c. 244 AH – 309 AH), was a Muslim Iranain mystic, poet, preacher, and teacher of Sufism, and one of the most controversial figures in Islamic history. During his lifetime he attracted a large popular following and was acclaimed as a saint by many ordinary believers, while Muslim jurists condemned him as a heretic. Most of his contemporary Sufis likewise disapproved of his actions, although he later became a major figure in the Sufi tradition.

Al-Hallaj was associated with the doctrine of fanāʾ, the extinction of individual consciousness, and with ideas described as ḥulūl, or union and identity with God. His mystical teaching sought to overcome the perceived gulf between the human being and God, expressing the relationship between the mystic and the divine in terms of an intimate union of lover and beloved. His most famous utterance, anā al-Ḥaqq ("I am the Truth"), was interpreted by many as a claim to divinity, while others understood it as an expression of the annihilation of the individual ego in which God, rather than the individual self, speaks through the mystic. To contemporary jurists, however, such teaching appeared blasphemously incompatible with the Islamic doctrine of tanzīh, the transcendence of God, and was also perceived as potentially threatening to the social order.

According to tradition, al-Hallaj was also known as Ḥallāj al-asrār, the "Carder of Consciences", because he was believed capable of discerning the secret thoughts of others. He deliberately taught a path of mystical union with God in opposition to what he regarded as the excessively dry and law-bound theology of his age. As a powerful public preacher, he was capable of moving audiences deeply and presented mystical experience as a condition in which the self is overwhelmed by divine presence and can no longer regard itself as autonomous from God.