Ana Al-Haqq (Reconsidered)

Translated by: Kamran Gilani This book is based on Metaphysical philosophy. The author has endeavoured to search the truth in this book. It is a problem for the man that he is going far from the faith, god and truth and he is wandering for the worldly things. Therefore, he is thirsty and unsatisfied. This book, shows the way of truth through, which mankind may gain satisfaction and belief.

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 tension of modern time. 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. To My mind, therefore, the conditions of our times provide sufficient justification for a reconsideration of what Hallaj had 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 what I have suggested.

Nevertheless, what has suffered the most in this situational crisis is the metaphysical relationship which forms the basis of an age of Faith. Therefore, the dread of unknowability of God has appeared on the outer boundaries of the physical world, and in the absence of a film metaphysical relationship the Revelation and its Truth is left out almost undefended.

It is against this background that I have attempted to approach Hallaj and his mystic thought because I feel that modern Muslim world shares much of its anguish with the Hallajian situation. I have tied to place Hallaj in his Age and have provided 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 suggestion, has also acquired slightly changed dimensions in my interpretation. However, while moving about in the world of Hallaj I have realised that Hallaj is still alive and relevant to the historic phenomenon in which we, as Muslims, are at present involved. I think Hallaj can answer satisfactorily some of the fundamental questions which disturb us today.

Hallaj was never forgotten by us. He has permeated our folk imagination and has lived through the centuries in our individual and collective memory. Nevertheless, for modern Hallaj Studies the credit indeed goes to the Western scholars who have reintroduced him on the graph of our present-day creative thought. It was most surely their love for the best in human experience which, by way of Hallaj and their interest in Islamic mysticism, enabled the Muslim Renaissance to enter its creative phase in the modern world. With these feeling I have consulted them at various places in my present work. I hope that in the contemporary state of our creative thought Hallaj and his experience will help us in resolving the tensions which are of course the price of course the price of a nation’s progress in history.

In the end, I take this opportunity to thank Mawlana Atiq-ur-Rehman of Government College, Rawalpindi, who very kindly translated into Urdu Hallaj’s Kitab al-tawasin for me, and helped me on various important points of textual interpretation. My thanks are also due to Professor Manawar Ashraf of M.A.O. College, who has been kind enough to go through the manuscript.