Hal
The spiritual state: what descends into the heart unsought, fleeting by nature, unlike the acquired maqam.
Hal means state, condition. In technical Sufi language it is what descends into the heart unearned and unsought: a sweetness in the invocation, a presence, a salutary sadness, an expansion. The doctrine’s watchword: the hal is received, it is fleeting, and it returns whence it came.
Al-Qushayri devotes whole chapters of his Risala to this distinction: the hal stands against the maqam, the station acquired by effort and abiding. The classical formula says the maqamat are stations where one alights, the ahwal states that pass through us. The wayfarer does not ask for states, he receives them; and whoever clings to a hal stops advancing.
The distinction matters at once for anyone listening to a sama’ or dhikr session and feeling something: that feeling is a hal, fragile and unplanned. It cannot be manufactured, and the emotion it stirs is neither proof nor goal. On what comes next in the journey, see salik.