Before Rūmī wrote his sublime verses on love and all of what he had to say about the unfolding of the heart and the spiritual life, there were many masters in the Arabic and Persian Sufi traditions who preceded him. One of the greatest authors of Persian Sufism was ʿAyn al-Quḍāt Hamadānī (d. 1131 CE),[1] the famous disciple of Aḥmad al-Ghazālī (d. 1126).[2] At the age of thirty-four, ʿAyn al-Quḍāt was imprisoned in Baghdad for a brief period and then executed in Hamadān on the order of the Seljuq Sulṭān Maḥmūd II.

An age-old myth is that ʿAyn al-Quḍāt was put to death by the “orthodox” Seljuqs because his teachings squarely contradicted mainstream Muslim theology. But as we now know, the reasons for his death had nothing to do with his ideas and were largely political. ʿAyn al-Quḍāt, a very prominent voice in Hamadānī society and a person of great public influence, was a vehement critic of the Seljuq regime and its injustices towards the poor and the needy. It was therefore in the Seljuqs’ best interest to murder ʿAyn al-Quḍāt, and to do so by justifying it as a state-sponsored execution of a person proven to have been a “heretic.”[3]