and personally wait upon them, then clothe each one in a shirt and give every orphan (1) seven dirhams—or, he said, three dirhams. Once he has done that, it counts for him as though he had performed the ḥajj (2).
Whoever fasts three days and does not break his fast until the fourth day with a few leaves of hindabā (endive) (3) is thereby exempted from the fast of Ramaḍān. Whoever performs two rakʿahs of prayer in a single night—from its beginning to its end—is excused from all prayer thereafter. And whoever spends ten days beside the graves of the martyrs and the cemetery of Quraysh, praying, supplicating, and fasting, and then breaks his fast only on some barley bread and coarse ground salt (4), is freed from worship for the rest of his life.
The judge Abū ʿUmar said to him, “Where did you get this?” He replied, “From Kitāb al-Ikhlāṣ (The Book of Sincerity) by al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī.” The judge retorted, “You lie, O one whose blood is lawful to shed! We heard Kitāb al-Ikhlāṣ of al-Ḥasan in Mecca, and none of this is in it.”
The vizier Ḥāmid ibn al-ʿAbbās turned to the judge Abū ʿUmar and said, “You have just said, ‘O one whose blood is lawful’; write that down on this document.” He insisted, handed him the inkwell, and the judge wrote it on the paper; those present added their signatures, and the vizier dispatched it to al-Muqtadir.
Meanwhile al-Ḥallāj kept saying to them, “My back is ḥimā, my blood inviolable, and it is not lawful for you to interpret against me [anything that would make it permissible] (5). My creed is Islam, my way the Sunnah, and I give precedence to Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, ʿAlī, Ṭalḥah, al-Zubayr, Saʿd, Saʿīd, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn ʿAwf, and Abū ʿUbaydah ibn al-Jarraḥ. I have books on the Sunnah that can be found with the booksellers—so, by Allah, by Allah, safeguard my blood!” They paid no heed (6) to anything he said. He kept repeating it while they kept writing their statements of what had transpired, after which al-Ḥallāj was returned to his cell.
Al-Muqtadir’s reply was delayed for three days, to the point that Vizier Ḥāmid ibn al-ʿAbbās became apprehensive. He wrote to the caliph: “Al-Ḥallāj’s affair has become infamous; no two people differ about him, and many of the populace have been put to trial because of him.” The answer came back that he should be handed over to Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Ṣamad, the chief of police: let him be struck with a thousand lashes; if he dies, well and good, and if not, his head is to be cut off. The vizier rejoiced at this, summoned the chief of police, delivered al-Ḥallāj to him, and sent a band of his own retainers to escort them to the western police headquarters, fearing he might be rescued en route. This took place after the night ʿishāʾ prayer on Tuesday night, six nights remaining of Dhū al-Qaʿdah of that year. Al-Ḥallāj was mounted on a mule fitted with a packsaddle (7),