on the neck; his body was burned, his head was set up for the people to see, and his severed hands and feet were hung beside it.

Abū ʿAlī al-Tanūkhī (1) said: Abū al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAyyāsh the judge related to me, on the authority of someone who informed him,

that he was present with Ḥāmid ibn al-ʿAbbās when al-Ḥallāj was arrested, and that books were brought which had been found in his house—letters from his missionaries in the provinces—in which they wrote: “We have sown for you in every land what will thrive there. Some people have responded that you are the Bāb, that is, the Imām; others maintain that you are the Master of the Age, meaning the Imām awaited by the Imāmīs; still others say that you are the bearer of the Greatest Dispensation, that is, the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace; and yet others assert that you are ‘He is He,’ that is, Allah.”

He continued: Al-Ḥallāj was asked to explain these letters, but he disowned them, saying, “I do not know these writings; they have been forged against me. I have no knowledge of what they contain, nor of the meaning of this talk.”

They then produced notebooks belonging to al-Ḥallāj which stated that if a person wished to perform the pilgrimage it sufficed for him to go to a house …, and he (the narrator) recounted the rest of the story.

Abū ʿAlī ibn al-Bannāʾ al-Ḥanbalī said: In our quarter, in the Arms Market, there was a man who used to say, “The Quran is a veil, and the Messenger is a veil; there is nothing but a servant and a Lord.” A group was beguiled by him and abandoned the acts of worship, after which he went into hiding for fear of being killed.

Al-Khaṭīb said in his History (2): News then reached Ḥāmid that al-Ḥallāj had deluded the palace servants and chamberlains, claiming that he could raise the dead, that the jinn served him, and that he had brought several birds back to life.

It was also reported that the scribe al-Qunnāʾī worshipped al-Ḥallāj and called people to him. His house was raided, and they brought from it notebooks and slips of paper in al-Ḥallāj’s own hand. Ḥāmid rose up, and al-Muqtadir handed al-Ḥallāj over to him; he kept him under guard and would bring him out every day