ABSTRACT
Allah alone, and loves only what Allah
loves. His passions, will and love are
naturally and voluntarily aligned with
God’s satisfaction. Hulul is the extreme
form of fana. Ibn Taymiyya describes it
as a distorted form of fana. This form
can be illustrated thus: A man fell in the
ocean, and his admirer threw himself
after him. The first said: ‘I fell in the ocean,
what made you throw yourself in?’ The
second replied: ‘I was incarnated in you,
so I thought you were the same as me.’
Ibn Taymiyya criticized this approach,
arguing that it misleads people into
thinking they are same as God, when
precisely the reverse is the case. In his
poetry, Rumi tried to explain this mys-
terious hulul. In Rumi’s poem ‘The Sun-
rise Ruby’, Rumi says: ‘There’s nothing
left of me. I’m like a ruby held up to the
sunrise. Is it still a stone, or a world
made of redness? It has no resistance to
sunlight.’ This is the way that al-Hallaj
spoke also, with the ruby and the sun-
rise being one in the same way that
humanity and God are one.
