An encounter with al-Hallaj’s teachings triggered Massignon’s Catholic conversion

Evidence

De Cuadra had introduced Massignon to the life and teachings of al-Hallaj, a controversial Sufi who had been hanged and then beheaded for heresy in Baghdad in 922. It was in pursuance of research on al-Hallaj that Massignon went to Iraq. Since he lived as an Arab he fell under suspicion of being a spy and was briefly imprisoned by the Turkish police and threatened with death (according to his own uncorroborated account). However, he escaped and it was during his flight that on 8 May 1908, before the ruins of Taq, the palace of Sasanian Emperor Khusrau, he experienced a mystical epiphany when he seemed to hear the doves above him call out ‘Haqq, haqq’. (Haqq is the Arabic for truth and one of the heretical statements that al-Hallaj had been accused of making was ‘Ana al-Haqq’, meaning ‘I am the Truth’, a statement that seemed to imply the mystic’s identity with God.) In 1909 Massignon formally converted to Catholicism. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 397