Steve Watson

Rumi on al-Hallaj; a Reductio on Tawhid

Consider the following argument by Rumi offered in explanation of Mansur al-Hallaj’s fevered declaration that he was God – a claim for which he was executed in 922:

When Hallaj’s love for God reached it utmost limit, he became his own enemy and he naughted himself. He said, “I am the Real,” (ana ul-Haqq) that is “I have been annihilated; the Real remains, nothing else.” This is extreme humility and the utmost limit of servanthood. It means, “He alone is.” To make a false claim and to be proud is to say, “You are God and I am the servant.” In this way you are affirming your own existene, and duality is the necessary result. If you say, “He is the Real,” that too is duality, for there cannot be a “He” without an “I.” Hence the Real said, “I am the Real.” Other than He, nothing else existed. Hallaj had been annihilated, so those were the words of the Real (Rumi, Fihi ma fihi, ed. B. Furuzanfar (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1969), p. 193. (Ex Chittick, op. cit. p. 17. Arberry’s translation is available here (pdf) in Discourse 52 on pp. 348 ff.))

This is interesting in several respects. In the first place, it seems like a fairly clear reductio ad absurdum of the extreme notion of tawhid that the Islamic scholars proposed: if God is One and this means that there is nothing outside of God, then anything that is undeniably Real must be God. Since it is undeniably the case that ‘I’ am Real (as established by an argument with which we are familiar from Descartes, but which dates back at least to Augustine – for example, at De Trinitate 10.10.14,) it follows that I am God. Since I am not God, it follows that this argument is unsound, and the most likely point at which it could fail is in the truth of the aforementioned interpretation of Oneness.

Another point of interest is that the conclusion that is reached (by al-Hallaj) is a fairly typical mystical claim, but I don’t recall having seen this precise argument made for it. In the Sufi tradition the approach to Union with God was rather considered to be a return of the love that God showed when he created the world. God’s love and its effect created the possibility of a distance between the world and God, and the choice of Man to love God created the possibility of nihilating that distance. Precisely how that is supposed to work remains a mystery to me. In any case, merely logical reasoning has never been accepted as sufficient to establish such a truth; it is always a discovery that is made by experience, and usually in an ‘altered state of consciousness’ – presumably because in a state more capable of reason the absurdity of the claim would be too obvious to miss.