ABSTRACT

In one of the few commentaries that Orientalist scholars have written on ʿAyn al-Quḍāt al-Hamadhānī, this is how he is introduced: “The most famous victim of outraged orthodoxy was al-Ḥallāj, ‘martyr-mystic of Islam’ as he was called by the late Louis Massignon.… Next most celebrated mystic-martyr… was al-Suhrawardi al-Maqtūl.… In the following pages an account is given of the life, works and death of a third Sufi martyr; comparable in spiritual insight and tragic end with al-Ḥallāj and al-Suhrawardi, but overlooked largely by Western scholarship.” 1 Thus, placing ʿAyn al-Quḍāt third in a genealogy of “martyr-mysties,” or alternatively “Sufi martyrs,” A. J. Arberry proceeds to give a short account of his life, his ideas, and his tragic end. My reading of ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s life and thoughts is so drastically different from the dominant Orientalist tradition, itself deeply informed by “mystical” hagiographical sources that Arberry’s words best represent, I am so constitutionally opposed to the genealogy that the distinguished British Orientalist constructs, and, finally, I am so fundamentally suspicious of terms such as “martyr-mysties” and “Sufi martyrs” that I need to give a full exposition of my way of reading ʿAyn al-Quḍāt in the following introduction.