Herbert Mason is University Professor of History and Religion at Boston University. Abridged from the four-volume The Passion of al-Hallaj, one of the major works of Western orientalism, this book explores the life and teaching of a famous tenth-century Sufi mystic and martyr, and in so doing describes not only his experience but also the whole milieu of early Islamic civilization. Louis Massignon (1883-1962), France's most celebrated Islamic specialist in this century and a leading Catholic intellectual, wrote of a man who was for him a personal inspiration.
From reviews of the four-volume translation: "The French original of this work has stood for most of this century as a model of the way Western scholarship can illumine a foreign culture, not patronize or denature it.... This translation climaxes one of the most focused projects of humanistic scholarship this century has seen."---Huston Smith, Commonweal "An incomparable study of the religious forces, the social and political life, and the whole culture of the Islamic world within which [this saint] lived and died."---Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Speculum: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies
