plain truth.
So I said, “Abu ʿAli has described this very volume and told me: ‘Bring it to me without letting the Shaykh know.’ Yet I am afraid of you, and I cannot defy him. What do you bid me do?”
He thereupon produced several folios from the words of al-Ḥusayn al-Ḥallāj, among them a treatise of his entitled al-Ṣayhūr fī Naqḍ al-Duhūr, and said, “Carry these to him.” (1)
It has been said that Sulamī’s writings amounted to a thousand fascicles (2), but that his Ḥaqāʾiq (3) contain Qarmatian notions. I do not think he intended to lie, yet he did relate absurdities from Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Rāzī the Sufi and from others.
Imām Taqī al-Dīn Ibn al-Ṣalāḥ said in his Fatāwā: “I found related from Imām Abū al-Ḥasan al-Wāḥidī, the Qur’an exegete—may Allah have mercy on him—that he declared: ‘Abu ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī composed Ḥaqāʾiq al-Tafsīr; if he believed that this was real exegesis, then he has indeed committed unbelief.’” (4)
I exclaim: Alas for deliverance! Alas, how strange the matter has become!
(1) See what al-Subki appended to this anecdote in his Tabaqat, 4/146.
(2) Among his published works are: Tabaqat al-Sufiyya (one edition edited by Nur al-Din Shurayba); Adab al-Suhba wa Husn al-‘Ishra, Jerusalem 1954, edited by Qustar; and al-Arbaun fi Akhlaq al-Sufiyya, Hyderabad. For manuscript copies of several of his other works, consult Fuat Sezgin, Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums, 2/499–503.
(3) That is, his book Haqa-iq al-Tafsir. The author states in Tadhkirat al-Huffaz that he wrote Haqa-iq al-Tafsir and filled it with calamities and the esoteric interpretations of the Batiniyya—may Allah protect us. Al-Subki remarks in the Tabaqat that much criticism has been directed at this work because it limits itself to Sufi interpretations whose wording departs from the apparent meaning. See also Muhammad Husayn al-Dhahabi, al-Tafsir wa al-Mufassirun, 2/384. Numerous manuscript copies of this tafsir are found in libraries worldwide; see Sezgin, Geschichte, 2/497–498. An abridgment entitled al-Tafsir al-Saghir is preserved in the Zahiriya Library, Tafsir 249.
(4) Fatawa Ibn al-Salah, p. 29.