No one can approach the subject of this chapter--the state of the mystic who has reached his journey’s end--without feeling that all symbolical descriptions of union with God and theories concerning its nature are little better than leaps in the dark. How shall we form any conception of that which is declared to be ineffable by those who have actually experienced it? I can only reply that the same difficulty confronts us in dealing with all mystical phenomena, though it appears less formidable at lower levels, and that the poet’s counsel of silence has not prevented him from interpreting the deepest mysteries of Sūfism with unrivalled insight and power. Whatever terms may be used to describe it, the unitive state is the culmination of the simplifying process by which the soul is gradually isolated from all that is foreign to itself, from all that is not God. Unlike Nirvāṇa, which is merely the cessation of individuality, _fanā_, the passing-away of the Sūfī from his phenomenal existence, involves _baqā_, the continuance of his real existence. He who dies to self lives in God, and _fanā_, the consummation of this death, marks the attainment of _baqā_, or union with the divine life. Deification, in short, is the Moslem mystic’s _ultima Thule_. In the early part of the tenth century Husayn ibn Mansūr, known to fame as al-Hallāj (the wool-carder), was barbarously done to death at Baghdād. His execution seems to have been dictated by political motives, but with these we are not concerned. Amongst the crowd assembled round the scaffold, a few, perhaps, believed him to be what he said he was; the rest witnessed with exultation or stern approval the punishment of a blasphemous heretic. He had uttered in two words a sentence which Islam has, on the whole, forgiven but has never forgotten: “_Ana ’l-Haqq_”--“I am God.” The recently published researches of M. Louis Massignon[21] make it possible, for the first time, to indicate the meaning which Hallāj himself attached to this celebrated formula, and to assert definitely that it does not agree with the more orthodox interpretations offered at a later epoch by Sūfīs belonging to various schools. According to Hallāj, man is essentially divine. God created Adam in His own image. He projected from Himself that image of His eternal love, that He might behold Himself as in a mirror. Hence He bade the angels worship Adam (Kor. =2.= 32), in whom, as in Jesus, He became incarnate. [21] _Kitāb al-Tawāsīn_ (Paris, 1913). See especially pp. 129-141. “Glory to Him who revealed in His humanity (_i.e._ in Adam) the secret of His radiant divinity, And then appeared to His creatures visibly in the shape of one who ate and drank (Jesus).”