I came across a treatise by Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn Bākūyah al-Shīrāzī on the case of al-Ḥallāj, in which he says: Ḥamd ibn al-Ḥallāj related to me:

“When my father was arrested, Naṣr al-Qushūrī sought permission from the caliph al-Muqtadir to build him a room inside the prison. He therefore constructed a small house adjoining the jail, sealed its outer door, built a wall around it, and opened a doorway that led directly into the prison. For a year people were allowed to visit him; afterwards they were prevented. He then remained for five months during which no one entered his presence—except on one occasion when I saw Abū al-ʿAbbās ibn ʿAṭāʾ slip in by stratagem, and another when I saw Abū ʿAbd Allāh ibn Khafīf while I was standing dutifully beside my father. They later confined me with him for two months; I was eighteen years old at the time.

On the night whose morning he was to be taken out, he rose, performed a few units of prayer, and kept repeating, ‘Deceit, deceit,’ until most of the night had passed. Then he fell silent for a long while and said, ‘Truth, truth.’ He stood, wrapped himself in a cloak, tied a waist-cloth around himself, stretched his hands toward the qiblah, and began to supplicate:

‘We are Your witnesses; we seek refuge in the radiance of Your might. So manifest whatever You will of Your Will. You are the One who is God in heaven and God on earth. O Unfolder of the ages, Fashioner of forms! O He before whom substances are humbled and accidents prostrate; by whose command bodies take shape and before whom judgments are configured. O He who reveals Himself to what He wills, as He wills, how He wills—like the self-disclosure within the sphere of Will to the most beautiful form.’

(Another recension reads: ‘like Your self-disclosure within Your Will as the most beautiful form.’)

‘That form is the rational soul which He has distinguished with knowledge, speech, and power.

Then You entrusted Your witnessing to me—for I am within Your very Ipseity—when You willed my beginning; You unveiled the realities of my knowledges and my miracles, raising me by my ascents to the thrones of my friends among my creatures at the moment the word was spoken.

I am about to die, to be slain, to be crucified, and to be burned; I shall be carried upon the storm-driving, dust-scattering winds. Yet a single mote that slips from the presumed frame of my theophanies is greater than the firmly rooted mountains.’

He then began to recite:
‘I mourn to you souls whose witnessing has vanished—
Beyond the unseen, or in the presence of primal eternity…’