Khalil about these hadiths, and he said, “We forged them only to soften people’s hearts.” (1)

And in Tarikh Baghdad (2) it is related that Abu Jaʿfar al-Shaʿiri said: “When Ghulam Khalil narrated a report from Bakr ibn ʿIsa on the authority of Abu ʿAwanah, I said to him, ‘Abu ʿAbd Allah! That shaykh died long ago; you never met him.’ He fell silent and I became uneasy, so I added, ‘Perhaps you heard it from someone who shared his name?’

“He said nothing, but the next morning he told me, ‘Last night I reviewed everyone in Basra from whom I had heard who was called Bakr ibn ʿIsa, and I found them to be sixty men.’

Ibn al-Aʿrabi said: “Ghulam Khalil arrived from Wasit, and these disgraceful matters were mentioned to him—meaning the Sufis’ involvement in the subtleties of spiritual states that the people of hadith censure. He was told of their talk about love, and it reached him that some of them say, ‘We love our Lord and He loves us; His love has overwhelmed us and made our fear fall away.’ He sought to rebut this error with one even greater, to the point that he declared love of Allah an innovation and used to say, ‘Fear is more fitting for us.’

“He was mistaken, for love and fear are two fundamental pillars, and no believer is devoid of them both. Yet he went on preaching against those people, warning the public about them, and inciting both the ruler and the masses against them, saying, ‘In Basra we had a group who professed indwelling, a group who held permissiveness, and a group who said such-and-such.’ Consequently, people began to say that in Baghdad there were men who espoused outright heresy.

“The mother of al-Muwaffaq inclined toward him, as did the court and the common folk, because of his asceticism and austerity. She instructed the muḥtasib (market inspector) to comply with Ghulam Khalil. He therefore pursued the group, dispatched his aides to hunt them down, and recorded their names; they numbered a little over seventy souls. Most of them went into hiding, some were rescued by the populace, and a number were imprisoned for a time.”