Kill me, my faithful friends
by Mansur al- HallajEnglish version by Andrew Harvey
Original Language Arabic
Kill me, my faithful friends,
For in my being killed is my life.
Love is that you remain standing
In front of your Beloved
When you are stripped of all your attributes;
Then His attributes become your qualities.
Between me and You, there is only me.
Take away the me, so only You remain.
 | -- from Perfume of the Desert: Inspirations from Sufi Wisdom, by Andrew Harvey / Eryk Hanut |
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Nothing like a death wish in the opening lines of a poem to startle us to attention--
At first reading, this poem by Hallaj is really rather disturbing. Why is he begging his "faithful friends" to kill him? Even the language of being "stripped" has an element of violence to it. Yet, with all of that, why does the poem seem to emanate such bliss?
When Hallaj asks to be killed, he follows by saying that "in my being killed is my life." He is not talking about physical death, he is talking about the mystic's death, the death of the ego-self, ecstatic annihilation in God. And in that annihilation, true life is found. This is what he implores his faithful friends to grant him.
Such a radical loss of the ego is like standing naked, "stripped of all your attributes" before God, the Beloved. When that occurs, we recognize the divine qualities are actually our own qualities and have been all along.
Hallaj's final lines are especially rich in meaning. When there is "me and You," that is, a sense of duality or separation between you and God, "there is only me." The ego-self, the "me," shades all perception so everything, even the idea of God, only reflects the ego back to itself.
This is why we must "take away the me." When we do that, when we drop the ego-sense, then no "me" remains and the Divine is found to be present everywhere.
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