The House of His Desires The life and legacy of al-Hallaj. By Kevin Blankinship Monday, October 31, 2022 Youth and Dervish, Iran, seventeenth century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1911. On a spring night in tenth-century Baghdad, a mob gathered to watch as a sixty-four-year-old man, plainly dressed and rail-thin from nine years spent in the city’s dungeons, was bound to a scaffol..