Ana Al-Haqq Reconsidered

Ana al-Haqq has once again become a cry in the wilderness. Only the landscape has changed, and the world of Hallaj is replaced by the tensions of modern times. In the changed environment the Muslims are faced with a strange phenomenon: strange in the sense that it has no familiar counterpart in the recent history of Muslim creative thought. The conditions of our times provide sufficient justification for a reconsideration of what Hallaj has to say in similar circumstances.

It is an agreed observation that the Muslim world is still at present passing through its Age of Faith; its sensibility is undissociated, and its human responses are still sensitive to physical and metaphysical affections. But the contact with the spirit of modern knowledge has much altered the intellectual scene of the Muslim world. The questions of modern knowledge have invaded the Age of Faith with the result that the Muslim mind has come across a challenge and a crisis. Man’s alienation from his fundamental condition has appeared in the Muslim world as a major question, and much in fact depends on how this question is answered by us in the foreseeable future. Intellectually, the Muslim world appears to be placed in an unresolved situation and its pathos seems to gradually drift away from the Age of Faith towards a state of alienation. The creative thinking has discovered its sources on the alienated soil, and what is history is rapidly becoming a part of legend. This seems to be the crisis of the Muslim world in the present times. It is not reasonable, however, to describe all this as a movement towards modernism because what is happening is scarcely horizontal. What is, in fact, taking place is the transformation in terms of alienation. The contemporary poetry being written in the Muslim world would provide evidence for this.

It is against this background that this work attempts to approach Hallaj and his mystic thought, as the Muslim world shares much of its anguish with the Hallajian situation. It is an attempt to place Hallaj in his Age and provide the Tawasin’s textual context to ana al-haqq in order to discover the common ground between the world past and the present. Al-Haqq, the Truth, though it possesses its traditional suggestions, has also acquired slightly changed dimensions. However, while moving about the world of Hallaj, one may recognize that Hallaj is still alive and relevant to the historic phenomenon in which Muslims are at present involved. Hallaj can answer satisfactorily some of the fundamental questions which disturb Muslims today.