Rabia al-Adawiyya: The Mystic Who Redefined Divine Love

One of the oldest stories told about her has Rabia walking through the streets of Basra in daylight carrying a flaming torch in one hand and a pail of water in the other. When people asked what she was doing, she said she meant to set fire to paradise and pour water on hell, so that both would vanish, and people would finally worship God for God alone, and not out of greed for the one or terror of the other. Whether or not she ever said it, the saying holds the whole of what she stood for.

The mystic of Basra

Rabia al-Adawiyya lived in the Iraqi city of Basra in the eighth century, dying around the year 801. The traditional biography, which comes mostly through later devotional writers, says she was born into deep poverty, the fourth daughter of a poor family, and was orphaned and sold into slavery as a girl. Her master, the story goes, woke one night to find her at prayer with a light hanging unsupported above her head, understood that he was keeping a saint as a servant, and freed her. She withdrew into a life of austerity, prayer and teaching, and turned down several offers of marriage on the grounds that she had no attention left over from God to spare for a husband.

Love instead of fear

Her contribution to the Sufi tradition was the idea of pure love of the divine as the heart of religion. Earlier piety had leaned heavily on fear of punishment and hope of reward. Rabia insisted that a love shaped by either was not really love of God but love of oneself, of one's own safety and comfort. She is remembered for a prayer asking that if she worshipped God from fear of hell she be burned in it, and if from hope of paradise she be shut out of it, but that if she worshipped God for his own sake, she not be denied his face. That note, devotion as love that expects nothing back, ran through centuries of later Sufi poetry.

What survives

Almost nothing she may have written survives, and the line between the historical woman and the saint of legend cannot now be drawn cleanly. Much of what is told of her comes from the Persian poet Attar, writing some four centuries later in his collection of the lives of the saints. But the figure tradition built has lasted, quoted and loved across the Muslim world for more than a thousand years, which is its own kind of evidence about the power of what she taught.

The Rabia al-Adawiyya print is part of the Riwayah Women of Legacy collection. You can view the print.

Rabia stands among the women who shaped the tradition. For more, see the women who built Islamic history.