enters, as it entered into
Jesus. When he has attained to this degree of perfection,
whatever he wills, happens, and whatever he does is done by God.

His letters to his disciples are said to have commenced with the
formula, "From the Lord of Lords to His slaves." His disciples wrote to
him:

O Spirit of the Spirit! O highest Aim of the holy: We bear
witness that Thou hast incarnated Thyself in the form of Hosain
the cotton-carder (Hellaj). We flee for protection to Thee and
hope in Thy mercy, O Knower of secrets.

The genuineness of these fragments has much to support it, but is not
entirely beyond doubt. This much, however, is clear, that the disciples
of Hellaj after his death regarded him as a divine being. Ibn Hazm, a
trustworthy author who wrote only 150 years after the execution of
Hellaj, says so expressly. Ghazzali, who wrote about fifty years later
still, does not mention this, but shelters Hellaj from the charge of
blasphemy by construing his exclamation "I am the Truth" in a
pantheistic sense, and excuses it by ascribing it to an excess of love
to God and to mystic ecstacy. In another place he says:

The first veil between God and His servant is His servant's
soul. But the hidden depth of the human heart is divine and
illuminated by light from above; for in it is mirrored the
eternal Truth completely, so that it encloses the universe in
itself. Now when a man turns his gaze on his own divinely
illumined heart he is dazzled by the blaze of its beauty, and the
expression "I am God!" easily escapes him. If from this stage he
does not advance further in knowledge, he often falls into error
and is ruined. It is as though he had allowed himself to be
misled by a little spark from the light-ocean of Godhead instead
of pressing forward to get more light. The ground of this
self-deception is that he in whom the Supernatural is mirrored
confuses himself with it. So the colour of a picture seen in a
mirror is sometimes confounded with the mirror itself.

Hellaj was no more than the representative of an old idea, Indian in
origin, which he combined with Sufism, thereby giving an entirely new
direction to Islamic thought, which was important, as leading to an
entirely new development of the conception of God. Even previous to
Hellaj, the doctrine of incarnation had emerged in Islam. The Caliph Ali
was reported to have been such, and was accordingly venera