Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya

Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya — “Rābiʿa of the Banū ʿAdī” — is the first great female figure of Sufism and probably, in several respects, one of the spiritual founders of the way. Before her, the Muslim asceticism of the first centuries was dominated by the fear of the Judgement and moral scruple. With her, a threshold is crossed: God is no longer only to be feared, He is to be loved — and to be loved not by the calculation of a reward, but for Himself.

A life of ordeal

Her real biography is largely unknown; what has come down to us is woven of pious legends gathered by ʿAṭṭār in his Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ (Memorial of the Saints). She is said to have been born in Basra, in Iraq, into a very poor family — the fourth daughter (hence her name Rābiʿa, “the fourth”). Orphaned at an early age, during a famine, she is said to have been sold as a slave.

According to the accounts, her master, seeing her pray at night instead of sleeping, and observing that a supernatural light surrounded her then, understood that he held a saint. He freed her. She withdrew to the desert for a time, then settled in a cell in Basra, where she lived the rest of her life in extreme poverty and continual prayer.

The bucket and the torch

The most famous episode — emblematic of her whole doctrine — is that of the walk through the streets of Basra. She walks, it is said, carrying a bucket of water in one hand and a flaming torch in the other. Asked about this strange gesture, she answers:

I am going to set fire to paradise and pour water on hell,
so that these two veils may disappear,
and that it may be seen clearly who worships God out of love,
and not out of fear of hell or hope of paradise. Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya

In a single sentence, she subverts the inherited religious logic: calculating piety (I obey in order to obtain, I abstain in order to avoid) is rejected as unworthy of God. To love God for anything other than Himself is not to love Him at all. This intuition would become the heart of all later Sufi mysticism.

The two loves

Rābiʿa herself distinguishes, in a famous poem, two degrees of the love she bears for God:

The “first love” — which she modestly calls “self-interested” — is in reality already very high: it is the love that occupies the whole soul with the presence of God, that distracts it from all else. The “second love,” the one she recognises as due to God, is the love that no longer depends on the lover — it is God who loves, through the lover He has emptied.

The Kaʿba itself

Another story transmitted by the hagiographers: Rābiʿa performed the pilgrimage to Mecca. Arrived before the Kaʿba, she said: “And what have I to do with the House? I desire the One of the House.” And according to the tradition, the Kaʿba itself would have advanced toward her — the symbolic gesture of an inverted veneration: it is no longer the pilgrim who prostrates before the sanctuary, it is the sanctuary that bows before the saint.

This story would later scandalise the jurists. For the Sufis, it says something essential: the religious forms themselves are only veils before the Beloved. When love is pure, the veils part — or rather, they prostrate themselves.

The refusal of marriage

Rābiʿa refused all her life to marry — an extraordinary thing for a woman of her time. Several renowned shaykhs, among them Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 728) — often associated with her in the tradition though he was older — are said to have asked for her hand. To each she answered with a variant: “My heart is wholly given to God — I have no other to give.”

This absolute celibacy marks a rupture with the usual Islamic model, which encourages marriage as the normal framework of the spiritual life. But Rābiʿa reaffirms a point: the ultimate degree of divine love requires total exclusivity. One cannot, at this level, share the heart between the creature and the Creator. This position would deeply influence, later, the feminine Sufi way.

A striking innocence

The words attributed to Rābiʿa strike by their disarming simplicity. They have the directness of amorous childhood, without any metaphysical ornament. Here are some of the best known:

O my Lord, if I worship You out of fear of hell, burn me in hell.
If I worship You in hope of paradise, exclude me from it.
But if I worship You for Yourself, do not withhold from me Your eternal beauty. Rābiʿa

My Beloved is with me always, and no other equals Him.
His love passes through my heart, and I see in every thing His face. Rābiʿa

O my God, give to my enemies all that You have given me in this life;
to my friends, paradise; and to me, You alone. Rābiʿa

Accounts of sainthood

The Sufi tradition has gathered — particularly through the Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ of ʿAṭṭār (12th c.), the Risāla of al-Qushayrī (11th c.) and the Ṭabaqāt al-Ṣūfiyya of al-Sulamī (10th c.) — a great number of anecdotes about Rābiʿa. Here are some of the most striking, chosen for what they say of her inner doctrine.

The wrist broken on the road

A slave in the house of her master, Rābiʿa is one day sent to carry a load along the road. To escape the heavy gaze of a stranger, she turns abruptly aside, slips, falls — her wrist breaks. Lying on the dust, her face against the earth, she prays:

Lord, I am far from my own, captive, an orphan,
and now my wrist has just broken.
Yet none of this grieves me.
One thing alone troubles me:
I do not know whether You are satisfied with me. Reported by ʿAṭṭār

And the tradition reports that a voice then answered her: “Do not worry, O Rābiʿa: on the day of the Resurrection, We shall give you a rank that the angels nearest to Us will envy.”

The cat, the lamp, and the offer of the whole world

One evening, Rābiʿa had prepared a little food to break her fast. She rose to light her lamp — during her absence, a cat passed and ate everything. She returned, saw the empty bowl, and said simply: “I shall break my fast with water.” She went toward the well; at that instant the lamp went out. She sighed deeply, and said under her breath:

Lord, why do You try me thus?

A voice answered her in the silence:

O Rābiʿa, if you desire it, I shall give you the whole world as your own.
But then I should have to take back, from your heart, the love you bear Me —
for the love of Me and the love of the world cannot dwell there together. Voice heard by Rābiʿa

From that night on, says Rābiʿa, “I expelled from my heart all love of earthly things, and I resolutely turned my gaze away from them. For thirty years, I have never prayed without saying inwardly: this prayer is perhaps the last. And I have never ceased to repeat: My God, make me so absorbed by Your love that no other affection finds place in my heart.”

The merchant and the purse of gold

Rābiʿa had fallen ill. Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, come to ask after her, found at her door a merchant who was weeping, a purse in his hand. “I have brought for Rābiʿa this purse full of gold — but I do not know whether she will accept it. Go, Ḥasan, and ask her.”

Ḥasan entered and conveyed the message. Rābiʿa answered:

You know well, Ḥasan, that the Most High gives the daily bread
even to those who do not worship Him.
How would He not give it to those whose heart burns with love for Him?

And besides, since I have known God,
I have turned my eyes away from all but Him.
How could I accept the money of a man
of whom I do not know whether it was gained by lawful means or not?

Present my excuses to the merchant. Let him go. Reported by Ḥasan al-Baṣrī

The house with paintings

Another merchant, seeing Rābiʿa's cell in poor condition, offered her a new house. She entered it. On the walls, decorative paintings. She began to contemplate them — and suddenly, recollecting herself, she left the house and refused to re-enter it:

I fear that my heart should attach itself to this dwelling
to the point that I would neglect the preparation of the other world.

The broken jug and the brick for a pillow

Mālik ibn Dīnār, a famous ascetic of Basra, reports: “I went to see Rābiʿa, and I found her drinking from a broken jug, lying on an old mat, a brick for a pillow. My heart was pierced at this sight, and I said to her: Rābiʿa, I have rich friends; if you permit, I shall go and ask them for something for you. She answered me:”

You speak ill, Mālik.
It is the Lord who, to them as to me, gives the daily bread.
He who provides for the needs of the rich —
will He not provide for the necessities of the poor?

If He wills that it should be thus for us,
we shall joyfully submit to His will. Rābiʿa, reported by Mālik ibn Dīnār

Sufyān al-Thawrī and the prayer for relief

Rābiʿa was again ill. ʿAbd al-Wāḥid and Sufyān al-Thawrī — one of the great masters of Iraqi asceticism — came to visit her. Seeing her so weak, they remained a moment unable to speak. At last Sufyān said: “O Rābiʿa, pray the Lord to relieve your sufferings.”

She answered:

O Sufyān, who sent me these sufferings?
— The Most High, he said.
— Well then! If He wills that this ordeal should visit me,
how could I, ignoring His will,
ask Him to remove it? Exchange transmitted by Sufyān al-Thawrī

Sufyān, troubled, then asked her: “Rābiʿa, speak to me rather of my own affairs.” She answered him: “If you had no inclination for this lower world, you would be a man without fault.” And Sufyān, in tears, cried out: “My God, can You be satisfied with me?” And Rābiʿa said to him gently: “O Sufyān, are you not ashamed to ask this of the Lord, without having done one single thing that pleases Him?”

The four degrees of sincerity

One day, in the company of Mālik ibn Dīnār, Ḥasan al-Baṣrī and Shaqīq al-Balkhī, the conversation fell upon the sincerity of the heart toward God. Each gave his definition.

— Ḥasan said: “He has no sincere love for God who does not bear with constancy the afflictions the Lord sends him.”
— “This remark smells of self-satisfaction,” said Rābiʿa.

— Shaqīq said: “He is not sincere who does not give thanks for the afflictions.”
— “There is a higher degree of sincerity,” said Rābiʿa.

— Mālik said: “He is not sincere who does not find delight in the afflictions the Lord sends him.”
— “That is not yet the purest sincerity,” she said.

Then they begged her to define sincerity herself. She said:

He is not sincere
who does not count as nothing the pain of affliction
through his absorption in God. Rābiʿa

The theologian who criticised the world

One of the learned theologians of Basra came one day to visit Rābiʿa. As soon as he was seated, he began to enumerate at length the faults of the world — its vanity, its snares, its falsehood. Rābiʿa listened to him a while, then interrupted him:

You must love the world greatly, my friend —
for if you did not love it, you would not speak of it so much.
He who truly wishes to buy a thing
never ceases to discuss its price.
If you were truly detached from it,
what would its merits or its faults matter to you? Rābiʿa

Posterity — of East and West

Rābiʿa becomes, for all later Sufi tradition, the inaugural model of pure love. Al-Ḥallāj owes to her his ʿishq. Rūmī cites her. All the great masters, whether sober or intoxicated, metaphysicians or poets, invoke her as the spiritual mother of their school.

A remarkable fact: her doctrine of the pure love of God also crossed Western history. During the Crusades, knights brought back to Europe the accounts of this fascinating mystic. In the thirteenth century, the chronicler Joinville, friend of King Saint Louis, reported to the court of France the story of the woman with the bucket and the torch. In the seventeenth century, she would inspire the partisans of Pure Love in the Quietist quarrel that stirred the France of Fénelon and Madame Guyon. In the twentieth century again, the German short-story writer Max Mell would devote to her his tale Die schönen Hände (“The beautiful hands”).

No other figure of Sufism, perhaps, has had such an interreligious fecundity. Rābiʿa has become a universal saint, whose central intuition — to love God for Him alone — overflows all confessions.

In the twentieth century, it was the English orientalist Margaret Smith who, the first, devoted a scholarly monograph to Rābiʿa: Rābiʿa the Mystic and Her Fellow-Saints in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 1928). This work, long the absolute reference, made it possible to establish the historical solidity of the figure and to restore her words from the Arabic and Persian sources. The same intuition runs through the work of Louis Massignon, who saw in Rābiʿa the inaugural figure of that “mysticism of pure love” which he would then study in al-Ḥallāj.

Sources and recommended reading

• Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār, Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ (Memorial of the Saints), thirteenth century. The principal classical source.
• al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-qushayriyya, eleventh century. A reference Sufi manual, containing several accounts of Rābiʿa.
• al-Sulamī, Dhikr al-niswa al-mutaʿabbidāt al-ṣūfiyyāt (Memorial of the Sufi Women), tenth century. The first great compilation on the Muslim women saints — recently translated by Rkia E. Cornell.
• Margaret Smith, Rābiʿa the Mystic and Her Fellow-Saints in Islam, Cambridge University Press, 1928 (public domain). The first scholarly Western monograph.
• Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Chapters devoted to Rābiʿa.