The Passion of Al-Hallaj:

...Hallaj pushed his union with God to the point where the two terms became transposable: at times he would address God, but then the roles would reverse and God, speaking through him, would address the objective Hallaj...

...Why did he break with his fellow-mystics, the Sufis...

...Following a severe bout with malaria he escaped, but in the course of these trials fell into a depression so acute that he would have taken his own life had it not been for what he experienced as a spiritual intervention...

...This causal, empowering aspect of Massignon's career lies, of course, outside academic speculation and discussion, but it does not obtrude into his work itself...

...In short, this is scholarship at its most high-powered, uncompromising best...

...that he did this through Hallaj's body was immaterial...

...it shows that under the formal reason for Hallaj's condemnation and execution his famous "ana'l-haqq, I am the Truth,'' where Truth doubles as a synonym for God a host of forces were working to find an excuse to get rid of a trouble-maker...

...Massignon looks for the explanation for this bent in Hallaj's theology...

...922) and the first edition of the present text (A.D...

...The religious barrier in his later life Massignon became a Franciscan tertiary was reduced by the fact that Hallaj appears to have consciously modeled his life on the Qur'anic account of Jesus...

...Not the least of the damaging consequences of this cultural imperialism is that Asian intellectuals who wish to achieve self-consciousness in the modern world must themselves wade through this muck that sucks at their self-esteem...

...Mircea Eliade's Shamanism and Yoga...

...neville braybrooke, a British writer, editor, and critic, is a long-time Commonweal contributor...

...HUSTON smith is professor of philosophy and religion at Syracuse University...

...And when God did thus enter and speak through him, Hallaj had the authority to act in ways that were binding on God, for (to repeat) at such times God was acting and speaking through him...

...That his student and friend, Herbert Mason, University Professor at Boston University, devoted thirteen years to translating and editing Massignon's study only compounds the dedication that produced this remarkable product...

...It is rumored that Mason is embarking on a single-volume joint biography of Massignon and Hallaj for a wider audience...

...Shortly after the Iranian revolution a columnist noted that though no part of the world is more important for America's well-being in the foreseeable future than that complex of religion, culture, and geography known as Islam, '' no part of the world is more hopelessly, systematically and stubbornly misunderstood by us" (Meg Greenfield, Newsweek, March 26, 1979...

...Massignon's empathy was of aproppr-tion that calls for explanation, and it turns out to be dramatic...

...Edward Said's Orientalism sets the tone...

...As a student on an archaeological mission to Mesopotamia, he was arrested on suspicion of being a French spy...

...Whether Massignon's account of these matters justifies Hallaj's behavior depends, I suspect, on where the reader himself stands on these issues, but let me summarize as best I can Massignon's conclusions...

...More subtle is Hallaj's own psychology which, as noted, seems actively to have sought martyrdom...

...Being at the time in Hallaj's territory, he came to feel that Hallaj was involved in some way in that visitation he had had a part in rescuing him in order that he might become his definitive interpreter...

...To return to more manageable matters, Volume One tells the story of Hallaj's life and death and describes the world in which he lived...

...The marvel is the way it is deployed to further understanding, not to double for or obscure it...

...I do not see how footnote 68 on page 341 of Volume Three can be correct, but this is the only typographical error I noticed in books that were obviously lovingly produced...

...If he, as God, went to this extreme for them, they would be saved, for it was God who was doing the dying...

...Normal Daniel's Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (University of Edinburgh, 1966) documents that misunderstanding in detail...

...It is this second edition, translated and edited with an important Foreword, that Mason gives us in the present volumes...

...His most recent book is The New Nuns: Serving Where the Spirit Moves (Fides/Claretian...

...And of course footnotes abound, sometimes as many as six to a single sentence...

...His latest book is Beyond the Post-Modern Mind...

...Volume Three sets forth the structure of his thought...

...FATHER RAYMOND E. BROWN, S.S., is Auburn Distinguished Professor of Biblical Studies at Union Theological Seminary...

...Third, as already noted, The Passion of al-Hallaj is a landmark in transcultural scholarship...

...With time, language, and religion thus accommodated, the stage was set for a living relationship...

...Sufis, whose tragic conflicts coincided with the breakdown of the universal Caliphate and Arab unity...

...Massignon's command of Arabic removed the language barrier...

...If the sword followed the cross, he says, the pen in turn followed the sword...

...So far Massignon's explanation is convincing...

...Massignon considered Hallaj an accessible person, one he came to know and cherish as much as he did his own self...

...Massignon answers the social, interpersonal parts of the puzzle by situating Hallaj's life at the junction of the foremost currents in the Islamic world at that time...

...world of tenth century Islam...

...But it is good to have this element introduced...

...When, forty years later, in 1962, Massignon died, he left behind a greatly expanded version representing forty years of additional research which was published as the second French edition in 1975...

...It is not so much I who have fathomed his heart," Massignon would say, "as he who has fathomed mine and fathoms it still...

...Husayn ibn Mansur of Persia, known as al-Hallaj, the carder (or reader) of hearts (A.D...

...we would not even know of it had not Mason done some detective work which he reports in his Foreword that places Massignon's work in context...

...They are, rather, reference sections, catalogues of information one can consult if interested in specific facts a demographic statistic about tenth-century Baghdad, the teachings of a particular Islamic school on some theological nicety, the meaning of terms that might appear in a Sufi lexicon, or whatever...

...It was thus that he could see his death as an atonement for wrongdoers and the damned...

...For in addition to being definitive and monumental in translation the set consists of three volumes totaling 1498 pages plus a 294-page fourth volume devoted entirely to bibliography and index the French original has stood for most of this century as a model of the way Western scholarship can illumine a foreign culture, not patronize or denature it...

...and Volume Four contains a full bibliography and index...

...1922) Massignon disposed of it by reconstructing, and in the process vicariously entering, virtually the whole ARTHUR A. COHEN is the author of the forthcoming An Admirable Woman (Godine...

...First, as one of the final issues in the now completed Bollingen series, it rounds out a program of subsidy nicely recounted in William McGuire's Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past, Princeton, 1982 that brought us over one hundred distinguished titles in literature (including The Collected Works of Paul Valery and Kathleen Raine's Blake and Tradition), depth psychology (Collected Works of C. G. Jung), and comparative religion (Heinrich Zimmer's Philosophies of India...

...For two hundred years Western scholars have filled the world's libraries with books that depict orientals and their civilizations as inferior...

...Readers must also be prepared to encounter technical terms which are not likely to be in their dictionaries any more than they are in mine "heacceity," "illeity," and the like...

...That Massignon succeeded in crossing this cultural barrier to the point of understanding, perhaps more fully than any Muslim ever has, its most puzzling figure is a testament to the transcultural possibilities of scholarship when empathy and scholarship empower it...

...He was the victim of a political trial that brought face-to-face the contending factions of his age: Sunnis vs...

...Auspiciously, they make their appearance in Massignon's centennial year he was born on July 25, 1883 to take their place alongside commemorations that UNESCO, the College de France, the Oriental Institute in Cairo, and Notre Dame de Paris have mounted...

...The original edition of La Passion d'al-Hallaj was devoted to translations of the martyr's extant poetry and prose...

...PATRICK JORDAN was formerly one of the editors of "The Catholic Worker in New York...

...There are several ways I shall note three in which this publication can be seen as a phenomenon...

...Huge sections of the books are unreadable...

...Many of these items were ahead of their time, and could not have been published without Bollingen's sponsorship...

...858-922) is recognized as one of Islam's greatest saints and mystics and its most famous martyr, but beneath this popular regard lie a host of enigmas...

...In this context, Herbert Mason's translation which makes Massignon's study of al-Hallaj available to the English-spealing world, appears to something of an event...

...Mason presents Hallaj and Massignon as living friends...

...As for the barrier of time exactly a millennium separates the death of Hallaj (A.D...

...Sheldon gellar is the author of Senegal: An African Nation Between Islam and the West...

...indeed, they were not designed for reading in the usual sense...

...In any case, Massignon's wrestlings with the issues mark the heart of his study, and I do not see how he could have done better by them...

...No brief statement can do justice to this complex subject, and quite apart from brevity I am not sure that I have Massignon's analysis altogether straight has anything ever been written on vicarious suffering and atonement that makes these subjects objectively intelligible...

...Massignon became obsessed with the figure of Hallaj at the age of twenty-five and poured the entire forty-five years of his career as an Is-lamicist at the College de France into studying him...

...Volume Two traces the growth of his influence in Islam over the centuries...

...Huston Smith WITH the third world pulling itself out of the colonial ditch Japan in the economic passing lane, OPEC holding trump cards at the international poker table it is not surprising to find Western studies of oriental history and civilizations coming in for sharp rebuke...

...Second, quite apart from its anchor position in the Bollingen series, this translation climaxes one of the most focused projects of humanistic scholarship this century has seen...

...JOHN DEEDY is former managing editor of Commonweal...

...Above all, why did he seem actually to seek martyrdom, almost engineering (it seems at times) his own demise...

...This is the subtlest region of his study, where three momentous possibilities of the human soul mystical union, atonement, and vicarous suffering converge...

...That he was executed by his own people fellow Muslims is but the beginning...

...Mason has also come up with a distillation of the entire project in a short dramatic narrative, The Death of al-Hallaj, which the University of Notre Dame published in 1979...

...And within Islam, no figure is more complex and enigmatic than the tenth-century mystic and martyr, al-Hallaj...

...Roger Lipsey's three-volume edition of the life and papers of A. K. Coomaraswamy...

...Though I retract nothing from my praise for every aspect of this enterprise, I must enter a major caveat...

...Shi'ites, scholars vs...