He said, “When they resolved to execute al-Hallaj, the jurists were summoned. They asked him, ‘What proof do you have?’
He answered, ‘They are signs with which al-Haqq (the Real) clothes the people of sincerity; within souls He plants an attraction that draws them to accept.’
All of them replied, ‘These are the words of the heretics.’
We say instead: Whoever weighs his own soul and reins it in (1) by the Book and the Sunnah possesses clear proof and argument; how futile is the arrow of the one who fails to attain that!

Ibn al-Jawzi said—according to what has been transmitted to me about him—that his shaykh Abu Bakr al-Ansari told him: “I, together with a group, bore witness before Abu’l-Wafa Ibn ‘Aqil, who said, ‘I had once adopted a view regarding al-Hallaj and defended him in a section of writing, but I now repent to Allah for that. He was put to death by the unanimous agreement of the jurists of his time; they were right and he alone was wrong.’”

Al-Sulami: I heard Mansur ibn ‘Abd Allah say: I heard al-Shibli declare, “Al-Hallaj and I were one and the same thing, except that he made it public while I kept it hidden.”
And I heard Mansur say: al-Shibli passed by him while he was crucified, looked at him and said, “Did we not forbid you to mingle with the worlds?!”

Abu’l-Qasim al-Tanukhi: My father informed us; Husayn ibn ‘Abbas related to me from someone who was present in the assembly of Hamid. They brought him al-Hallaj’s notebooks, and in them it was written: “If a person intends to perform the pilgrimage, he may dispense with it by selecting a room in his own house, constructing a prayer-niche in it, bathing, entering the state of ihram, saying such-and-such, praying such-and-such, and circumambulating that room; when he has finished, the obligation of pilgrimage to the Ka‘ba has been lifted from him.”

Al-Hallaj acknowledged this and said, “That is something I transmitted exactly as I heard it.”
The minister seized on this statement against him and sought legal opinions from the two qadis: Abu Ja‘far Ahmad ibn al-Bahlul and Abu ‘Umar Muhammad ibn Yusuf. Abu ‘Umar said, “This is heresy that requires execution.”
Abu Ja‘far said, “Execution is not required for this unless he admits that he actually believes it, because people have—”

(1) i.e., curbs it and keeps it in check.