with falsehood.
Ibn Taymiyyah was not merely stating his personal view on al-Hallāj; rather, he pronounced the Sharia’s ruling on a man who had sought to strike the pillar of ḥajj from Islam.

We are deeply pained by the deadly offenses that Sufism has suffered at the hands of its own followers—offenses that, in our estimation, pose a direct threat to the creed itself. These dangers may be summarized as follows:

1- The principal Sufi terms have undergone a perilous transformation. The irresistible allure that wafts through the Sufi world, together with the ethereal clarity that follows spiritual refinement—whose translucence pushes material density behind the veil of abstract meanings—has caused the terminology to veer far from its sound origin into illegitimate offshoots that have no basis in religion and drip with innovation.

Consider, for example, the term murīd. It stems from irāda (will). In the technical vocabulary of spiritual conduct—which we may call the Sufi lexicon—irāda is the stage that precedes intention: the doer identifies the aim of his deed—why he is performing it—and once he resolves that his will is for Allah, he begins to purge that will of every blemish and passing thought that might taint and corrupt it. This identification is irāda, and the one who performs it is the murīd. Yet the term evolved: first the murīd was “a seeker of the path,” and then, more narrowly, “a disciple of a specific shaykh.” From directing the will to Allah to directing it to a shaykh, calamities have arisen whose magnitude only Allah and those firmly grounded in knowledge truly know.

2- This corruption of terminology has produced, in turn, an assault on the creed itself. The ignorant shaykh, enchanted by the gathering of disciples around him, becomes preoccupied with preserving the worldly prestige that keeps people clustered in his orbit—obedient to his commands, revering him,