Fazlullah-ı Hurûfî and Hurûfîs

Fazlallah Hurufi is creator and spiritual head of the Hurufi movement, also called Astarabadi and Naimi. He was born in Astrabad, Iran, in 740/1340. He was strongly drawn to Sufism and the teachings of and Rumi at an early age. In 1357, at around the age of seventeen, Fazlallah started his journey and travelled between Khwarazm, Isfahan, Tabriz, Yazd, Damghan and Baku. In the beginning, he was still in the mainstream of Sufi tradition. Later, he did move towards more esoteric spirituality. In 788/1386, he started to propagate his teachings all over Persia and Azerbaijan. Failing to convert Timur, he was executed in 796/1394 near Alinjak castle in Nakhichevan by the Timur's son Miranshah. The uprising of Hurufis, who had gathered a large following, was crushed in Azerbaijan, but the popular movement survived for another decade or so in different guises.According to Fadlullah, the Qur'an is a kabbalistic system of letters, as expounded by later Hurufis. The Universe is eternal and moves by rotation. God is incarnated in everything. This incarnation was occur by words and 28 letters of Arabic alphabet and 32 letters of Persian. God's visage is imperishable and is manifest in Human ? especially his/her face-, the best of forms.After Fazlullah?s death, his ideas were developed and spread by Nasimi and Ali-ul A'la and İbn Farishtah and other Hurufis. Bektashism in Turkey and Ahl-e Haqq in Iran were influenced by Hurufism. These owe a lot of their theological vocabulary to Hurufism.