Fana and baqa's basic structure, a passing away of the self that issues in a transformed abiding, has a recognized parallel in Christian mystical theology, drawn by scholars of comparative mysticism since the early twentieth century.
Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century Dominican, taught a doctrine of Gelassenheit, releasement, in which the soul empties itself of its own will and even its sense of a separate self to make room for the birth of God within it, language that drew accusations of heresy for reasons structurally similar to the charges against al-Hallaj: both were accused of collapsing the distinction between the soul and God rather than describing a union that preserves it. John of the Cross described a dark night of the soul in which the self's habitual faculties are systematically stripped away, followed by a transformative union he described, in terms recalling Junayd's sober formulation rather than Bistami's ecstatic one, as a union of wills that does not erase the creator-creature distinction.
Teresa of Avila's image of spiritual marriage in the Interior Castle supplies a further parallel to baqa: a state in which the self, having been most thoroughly emptied, abides most fully and stably in God, active in ordinary life rather than absorbed in ecstatic withdrawal, closely paralleling the Sufi insistence that baqa is a return to functioning selfhood after fana rather than a permanent trance. Scholars including Reynold Nicholson and Louis Massignon have debated whether these parallels reflect genuine historical contact, since medieval Islamic and Christian mystical circles were not wholly isolated from each other, or independent convergence on similar contemplative experience, a question that has not been settled.