<\/p>\n
Consider the following argument by Rumi offered in explanation of Mansur al-Hallaj\u2019s fevered declaration that he was God \u2013 a claim for which he was executed in 922:<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n <\/font><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n <\/font><\/p>\n When Hallaj\u2019s love for God reached it utmost limit, he became his own enemy and he naughted himself. He said, \u201cI am the Real,\u201d (ana ul-Haqq<\/em>) that is \u201cI have been annihilated; the Real remains, nothing else.\u201d This is extreme humility and the utmost limit of servanthood. It means, \u201cHe alone is<\/em>.\u201d To make a false claim and to be proud is to say, \u201cYou are God and I am the servant.\u201d In this way you are affirming your own existene, and duality is the necessary result. If you say, \u201cHe is the Real,\u201d that too is duality, for there cannot be a \u201cHe\u201d without an \u201cI.\u201d Hence the Real said, \u201cI am the Real.\u201d Other than He, nothing else existed. Hallaj had been annihilated, so those were the words of the Real (Rumi, Fihi ma fihi, <\/em>ed. B. Furuzanfar (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1969), p. 193. (Ex Chittick, op. cit.<\/em> p. 17. Arberry’s translation is available here <\/a>(pdf) in Discourse 52 on pp. 348 ff<\/span>.))<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n <\/font><\/p>\n This is interesting in several respects. In the first place, it seems like a fairly clear reductio ad absurdum<\/em> of the extreme notion of tawhid<\/em> 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 \u2018I\u2019 am Real (as established by an argument with which we are familiar from Descartes, but which dates back at least to Augustine \u2013 for example, at De Trinitate <\/em><\/span>10.10.14,) it follows that I am God. Since I am not<\/em> 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.<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n <\/font><\/p>\n Another point of interest is that the conclusion that is reached (by al-Hallaj) is a fairly typical mystical claim, but I don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 \u2018altered state of consciousness\u2019 \u2013 presumably because in a state more capable of reason the absurdity of the claim would be too obvious to miss.<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Consider the following argument by Rumi offered in explanation of Mansur al-Hallaj\u2019s fevered declaration that he was God \u2013 a claim for which he was executed in 922: \u00a0 When Hallaj\u2019s love for God reached it utmost limit, he became his own enemy and he naughted himself. He said, \u201cI am the Real,\u201d (ana ul-Haqq) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,20],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arguments","category-religion","tag-sufism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}