Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya
Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya (Rābiʻa al-ʻAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya) (Rābiʻa al-Basrī) (713/717-801). Mystic and saint of Basra. She gathered round her many disciples, and many miracles were attributed to Rabia al-Adawiyya
Rābiʻa al-ʻAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya was a female Muslim Sufi saint who is highly regarded and has been conferred the status of Half-Qalander.
She was born in Basra, Iraq. Much of her early life is narrated by Farid al-Din Attar, a later Sufi saint and poet, who used earlier sources. Rabia herself did not leave any written works.
Apart from tradition, all we know is that Rabi'a lived in Basra, Iraq, in the second half of the 700s (the second Islamic century), that she was probably a freed slave, and that she is considered one of the first of the Sufis (from the Arabic for "mystic"), those Muslims who emphasize an intensely personal relationship with Allah.
According to tradition, Rabi'a was born free, but sold into slavery at her parents' death. She was freed by a miracle, and, except for at least one pilgrimage to Mecca, lived all of her life in Basra as a celibate ascetic who debated with and taught the major religious figures of her time. We have descriptions of Rabi'a from scholars of the 800s and 900s, but most of the stories of her come down to us from the writings of Farid al-Din 'Attar (d. c.1230). It is through 'Attar that we have Rabi'a's words; she herself left no written documents.
Basra, near the Persian Gulf, was an important military and trading site, both for sea trade and for overland routes from the Arabian peninsula. From its foundation in the mid-600s, it was a center of Islamic religious and intellectual thought. Hasan al-Basri (d.728) was the city's first major ascetic figure; since he was probably dead before Rabi'a reached adulthood, the anecdotes about their meetings may reflect conflict between their respective disciples. Rabi'a represents those who, while never going outside the bounds of Muslim orthodoxy, moved from an emphasis on ritual to a total concentration on Allah and identification with his will.
Rabi'a began her ascetic life in a small desert cell near Basra, where she lost herself in prayer and went straight to God for teaching. As far as is known, she never studied under any master or spiritual director. She was one of the first of the Sufis to teach that Love alone was the guide on the mystic path. A later Sufi taught that there were two classes of "true believers": one class sought a master as an intermediary between them and God -- unless they could see the footsteps of the Prophet on the path before them, they would not accept the path as valid. The second class “...did not look before them for the footprint of any of God's creatures, for they had removed all thought of what He had created from their hearts, and concerned themselves solely with God.
Rabi'a was of this second kind. She felt no reverence even for the House of God in Mecca: "It is the Lord of the house Whom I need; what have I to do with the house?" One lovely spring morning a friend asked her to come outside to see the works of God. She replied, "Come you inside that you may behold their Maker. Contemplation of the Maker has turned me aside from what He has made". During an illness, a friend asked this woman if she desired anything.
"...[H]ow can you ask me such a question as 'What do I desire?' I swear by the glory of God that for twelve years I have desired fresh dates, and you know that in Basra dates are plentiful, and I have not yet tasted them. I am a servant (of God), and what has a servant to do with desire?"
When a male friend once suggested she should pray for relief from a debilitating illness, she said,
"O Sufyan, do you not know Who it is that wills this suffering for me? Is it not God Who wills it? When you know this, why do you bid me ask for what is contrary to His will? It is not well to oppose one's Beloved."
She was an ascetic. It was her custom to pray all night, sleep briefly just before dawn, and then rise again just as dawn "tinged the sky with gold". She lived in celibacy and poverty, having renounced the world. A friend visited her in old age and found that all she owned were a reed mat, screen, a pottery jug, and a bed of felt which doubled as her prayer-rug, for where she prayed all night, she also slept briefly in the pre-dawn chill. Once her friends offered to get her a servant; she replied,
"I should be ashamed to ask for the things of this world from Him to Whom the world belongs, and how should I ask for them from those to whom it does not belong?"
A wealthy merchant once wanted to give her a purse of gold. She refused it, saying that God, who sustains even those who dishonor Him, would surely sustain her, "whose soul is overflowing with love" for Him. And she added an ethical concern as well:
"...How should I take the wealth of someone of whom I do not know whether he acquired it lawfully or not?"
She taught that repentance was a gift from God because no one could repent unless God had already accepted him and given him this gift of repentance. She taught that sinners must fear the punishment they deserved for their sins, but she also offered such sinners far more hope of Paradise than most other ascetics did. For herself, she held to a higher ideal, worshipping God neither from fear of Hell nor from hope of Paradise, for she saw such self-interest as unworthy of God's servants. Emotions like fear and hope were like veils -- i.e., hindrances to the vision of God Himself. The story is told that once a number of Sufis saw her hurrying on her way with water in one hand and a burning torch in the other. When they asked her to explain, she said:
"I am going to light a fire in Paradise and to pour water on to Hell, so that both veils may vanish altogether from before the pilgrims and their purpose may be sure..."
She was once asked where she came from. "From that other world," she said. "And where are you going?" she was asked. "To that other world," she replied. She taught that the spirit originated with God in "that other world" and had to return to Him in the end. Yet if the soul were sufficiently purified, even on earth, it could look upon God unveiled in all God's glory and unite with him in love. In this quest, logic and reason were powerless. Instead, she speaks of the "eye" of her heart which alone could apprehend God and God's mysteries.
Above all, she was a lover. Her hours of prayer were not so much devoted to intercession as to communion with her Beloved. Through this communion, she could discover God's will for her. Many of her prayers have come down to us:
"I have made Thee the Companion of my heart,
But my body is available for those who seek its company,
And my body is friendly towards its guests,
But the Beloved of my heart is the Guest of my soul." [224]
Another:
"O my Joy and my Desire, my Life and my Friend. If Thou art satisfied with me, then, O Desire of my heart, my happiness is attained."
She was asked once if she hated Satan.
"My love to God has so possessed me that no place remains for loving or hating any save Him."
To such lovers, she taught, God unveiled himself in all his beauty and revealed the Beatific Vision. For this vision, she willingly gave up all lesser joys.
"O my Lord," she prayed, "if I worship Thee from fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me thence, but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, then withhold not from me Thine Eternal Beauty."
Rabi'a was in her early to mid eighties when she died, having followed the mystic Way to the end. By then, she was continually united with her Beloved. As she told her Sufi friends, "My Beloved is always with me"
Rabi‘a’s role in the development of Sufi thought is highlighted by numerous anecdotes concerning her relationship with Hasan of Basra (d. 728). Hasan was the most famous religious authority of his time, an expert of hadith (traditions of the Prophet) and an acquaintance with many of the Prophet’s companions. He was one of the first advocates of ascetic piety in Islam and at the same time one of the first critical investigators into the issue of divine pre-determination and human free will. Indeed, Hasan is considered by many to be the founder of both Sufism and Islamic scholastic theology (kalam).
If, as the anecdotes suggest, Rabi‘a knew Hasan, he must have been very old at the time, and she very young. The crucial point in the Hasan and Rabi‘a stories is not their objective historicity, however, but the key Sufi concepts that are built upon the medieval Sufi convention of the spiritual contest in which two sages compete verbally with one another, one of them coming out as the wiser or more sincere. The humble former slave Rabi‘a continually wins in her jousts with Hasan, the most famous religious and intellectual figure of his time. What binds these stories together, and what links them with other anecdotes and sayings, is Rabi‘a’s ability to synthesize ascetic piety with theological concerns (two areas that seemed to remain compartmentalized with Hasan) into a new way of thinking that was to become the ground of Sufism.
This synthesis combined the Qur’anic doctrine of the unity of God (tawhid) with ascetic impulses and a continuing investigation of the issue of human free will and divind predetermination. For Rabi‘a, affirmation of one God was not a matter of mere verbal correctness. Divine unity could be authentically affirmed only by turning one’s entire life and consciousness toward that one deity. To consider anything else was, in effect, a form of idolatry. She constantly criticized Hasan and other spiritual leaders for becoming attached to the ascetic piety and treating it as an end in and of itself. Rabi‘a offered a devastating critique of those claiming to despise the world for the sake of God. She opined that if those who despised the world had truly achieved an affirmation of one God, they would not by paying enough attention to anything else, including the world, to bother despising it.
Thus, the doctrinal affirmation of one God as a theistic principle was combined with a spiritual quest in which only one thing could be the object of one’s concern. This combination led to Rabi‘a’s celebrated notion of sincerity (sidq), or sincere love. For Rabi‘a, sincerity is not compatible with acting out of hope for reward or fear of punishment.
The passages in the Qur’an on the day of judgment or moment of truth are among the most compelling and most beautiful examples of prophetic discourse. They are open to many interpretations. Yet by Rabi‘a’s time, it is clear that they had become associated in the popular mind with a complex topography of Heaven and Hell (with seven levels in each and various descriptions of the joys and torments of the inhabitants) and with a psychology of reward and punishment. Hasan of Basra was famous for his continual intensification of fear of Hell in meditation as a way of motivating and overcoming the appetites of the carnal self.
Rabi‘a rejected the entire edifice of reward and punishment. In numerous prayers, she is quoted as asking the Deity to deny her Paradise if she desires or worships out of hope for Paradise, and to condemn her to Hell if she worships out of fear of Hell. The most famous anecdote represents Rabi‘a as running down the path with fire in the one hand and water in the other. When asked what she was doing, Rabi‘a responded that she wished to burn Paradise and douse the fires of Hell, so that no one will ever love God except out of pure love, devoid considerations of reward and punishment. To be concerned with anything (even Heaven and Hell) beside the one God is in effect to affirm something else as God.
Rabi‘a was implacably consistent in her articulation of this notion of sincere love. When asked if she hated Satan, she responded no, she was too busy loving God to think about Satan. When asked if she loved the Prophet Muhammad, she said no, with the most profound respect to the Prophet, she had room for only One Beloved. To love another would be to take another being as one’s God.
Connected with this conception of sincerity was Rabi‘a’s rigorous understanding of the virtue of trust-in-God (tawakkul). In numerous anecdotes, Rabi‘a is depicted as not only refusing to plan for the future, but even to consider it. To make plans for the future, hoard up supplies, or build up furnishings is to fail to put one’s full trust in the Deity. It is also a contradiction of the rigorous affirmation of one God; to put one’s trust in one’s own plan is to make of that plan one’s God.
The resultant way of life and thought can be characterized as one of active acceptance (rida), that is, absolute acceptance of the infinite divine will. It is crucial to distinguish between Rabi‘a’s active notion of acceptance and passive resignation or fatalism. In several anecdotes, Rabi ‘a’ refuses to ask anything of any human creature, because to do so would violate the principle of trust-in-God and the unity of God. She goes on to refuse to ask the Deity for anything, on the grounds that the Deity knows her condition already, and has forewilled it. Such petition then would violate the principle of acceptance. Rather than leading to passivity or fatalism, this absolute acceptance is viewed as the key to authentic action. In the anecdotes about Rabi‘a it is this active acceptance that is the proof of her authenticity to those around her.
The depth of Rabi‘a’s sincerity acted as a protection for her in an often insecure world; as a freed woman she had more prerogatives for refusing marriage than other women, but she could not have led the public and vocal life she lived had she not been, in the words of ‘Attar, veiled by the veil of sincerity.
Ultimately, the major concepts of Rabi‘a’s thought are tied together in the ultimate intellectual and spiritual goal: extinction (fana’) of the ego-self in union with the Divine Beloved. It is only in such extinction that the extreme versions of trust, active acceptance, sincerity beyond hope for reward and fear of punishment, and true affirmation of divine unity can be attained. In such extinction, the Deity works in and through the human in the state of the annihilation of the ego-self.
The concept of the annihilation of the self in mystical union, central for all subsequent Sufi philosophy, would be further developed by the other major thinkers of early Sufism: Junayd (d. 910), Bistami (d. c. 875), Tustari (d. 896), and Hallaj (d. 922). Later Sufis such as Qushayri would go on to place concepts of trust, sincerity, acceptance, poverty, and divine unity into complex categories of “stations” (maqamat) and momentary states (ahwal), but the essential configuration is, according to the biographers of Rabi‘a’, the great achievement of this self-educated former slave girl of Basra. Ultimately, Rabi‘a ‘al-Adawiyya is recognized by Sufi tradition as central in forging the new synthesis of theology and ascesis that would come to be known as Sufism
Rābiʻa al-ʻAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya see Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya
Rābiʻa al-Basrī see Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya
Rābiʻa al-ʻAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya was a female Muslim Sufi saint who is highly regarded and has been conferred the status of Half-Qalander.
She was born in Basra, Iraq. Much of her early life is narrated by Farid al-Din Attar, a later Sufi saint and poet, who used earlier sources. Rabia herself did not leave any written works.
Apart from tradition, all we know is that Rabi'a lived in Basra, Iraq, in the second half of the 700s (the second Islamic century), that she was probably a freed slave, and that she is considered one of the first of the Sufis (from the Arabic for "mystic"), those Muslims who emphasize an intensely personal relationship with Allah.
According to tradition, Rabi'a was born free, but sold into slavery at her parents' death. She was freed by a miracle, and, except for at least one pilgrimage to Mecca, lived all of her life in Basra as a celibate ascetic who debated with and taught the major religious figures of her time. We have descriptions of Rabi'a from scholars of the 800s and 900s, but most of the stories of her come down to us from the writings of Farid al-Din 'Attar (d. c.1230). It is through 'Attar that we have Rabi'a's words; she herself left no written documents.
Basra, near the Persian Gulf, was an important military and trading site, both for sea trade and for overland routes from the Arabian peninsula. From its foundation in the mid-600s, it was a center of Islamic religious and intellectual thought. Hasan al-Basri (d.728) was the city's first major ascetic figure; since he was probably dead before Rabi'a reached adulthood, the anecdotes about their meetings may reflect conflict between their respective disciples. Rabi'a represents those who, while never going outside the bounds of Muslim orthodoxy, moved from an emphasis on ritual to a total concentration on Allah and identification with his will.
Rabi'a began her ascetic life in a small desert cell near Basra, where she lost herself in prayer and went straight to God for teaching. As far as is known, she never studied under any master or spiritual director. She was one of the first of the Sufis to teach that Love alone was the guide on the mystic path. A later Sufi taught that there were two classes of "true believers": one class sought a master as an intermediary between them and God -- unless they could see the footsteps of the Prophet on the path before them, they would not accept the path as valid. The second class “...did not look before them for the footprint of any of God's creatures, for they had removed all thought of what He had created from their hearts, and concerned themselves solely with God.
Rabi'a was of this second kind. She felt no reverence even for the House of God in Mecca: "It is the Lord of the house Whom I need; what have I to do with the house?" One lovely spring morning a friend asked her to come outside to see the works of God. She replied, "Come you inside that you may behold their Maker. Contemplation of the Maker has turned me aside from what He has made". During an illness, a friend asked this woman if she desired anything.
"...[H]ow can you ask me such a question as 'What do I desire?' I swear by the glory of God that for twelve years I have desired fresh dates, and you know that in Basra dates are plentiful, and I have not yet tasted them. I am a servant (of God), and what has a servant to do with desire?"
When a male friend once suggested she should pray for relief from a debilitating illness, she said,
"O Sufyan, do you not know Who it is that wills this suffering for me? Is it not God Who wills it? When you know this, why do you bid me ask for what is contrary to His will? It is not well to oppose one's Beloved."
She was an ascetic. It was her custom to pray all night, sleep briefly just before dawn, and then rise again just as dawn "tinged the sky with gold". She lived in celibacy and poverty, having renounced the world. A friend visited her in old age and found that all she owned were a reed mat, screen, a pottery jug, and a bed of felt which doubled as her prayer-rug, for where she prayed all night, she also slept briefly in the pre-dawn chill. Once her friends offered to get her a servant; she replied,
"I should be ashamed to ask for the things of this world from Him to Whom the world belongs, and how should I ask for them from those to whom it does not belong?"
A wealthy merchant once wanted to give her a purse of gold. She refused it, saying that God, who sustains even those who dishonor Him, would surely sustain her, "whose soul is overflowing with love" for Him. And she added an ethical concern as well:
"...How should I take the wealth of someone of whom I do not know whether he acquired it lawfully or not?"
She taught that repentance was a gift from God because no one could repent unless God had already accepted him and given him this gift of repentance. She taught that sinners must fear the punishment they deserved for their sins, but she also offered such sinners far more hope of Paradise than most other ascetics did. For herself, she held to a higher ideal, worshipping God neither from fear of Hell nor from hope of Paradise, for she saw such self-interest as unworthy of God's servants. Emotions like fear and hope were like veils -- i.e., hindrances to the vision of God Himself. The story is told that once a number of Sufis saw her hurrying on her way with water in one hand and a burning torch in the other. When they asked her to explain, she said:
"I am going to light a fire in Paradise and to pour water on to Hell, so that both veils may vanish altogether from before the pilgrims and their purpose may be sure..."
She was once asked where she came from. "From that other world," she said. "And where are you going?" she was asked. "To that other world," she replied. She taught that the spirit originated with God in "that other world" and had to return to Him in the end. Yet if the soul were sufficiently purified, even on earth, it could look upon God unveiled in all God's glory and unite with him in love. In this quest, logic and reason were powerless. Instead, she speaks of the "eye" of her heart which alone could apprehend God and God's mysteries.
Above all, she was a lover. Her hours of prayer were not so much devoted to intercession as to communion with her Beloved. Through this communion, she could discover God's will for her. Many of her prayers have come down to us:
"I have made Thee the Companion of my heart,
But my body is available for those who seek its company,
And my body is friendly towards its guests,
But the Beloved of my heart is the Guest of my soul." [224]
Another:
"O my Joy and my Desire, my Life and my Friend. If Thou art satisfied with me, then, O Desire of my heart, my happiness is attained."
She was asked once if she hated Satan.
"My love to God has so possessed me that no place remains for loving or hating any save Him."
To such lovers, she taught, God unveiled himself in all his beauty and revealed the Beatific Vision. For this vision, she willingly gave up all lesser joys.
"O my Lord," she prayed, "if I worship Thee from fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me thence, but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, then withhold not from me Thine Eternal Beauty."
Rabi'a was in her early to mid eighties when she died, having followed the mystic Way to the end. By then, she was continually united with her Beloved. As she told her Sufi friends, "My Beloved is always with me"
Rabi‘a’s role in the development of Sufi thought is highlighted by numerous anecdotes concerning her relationship with Hasan of Basra (d. 728). Hasan was the most famous religious authority of his time, an expert of hadith (traditions of the Prophet) and an acquaintance with many of the Prophet’s companions. He was one of the first advocates of ascetic piety in Islam and at the same time one of the first critical investigators into the issue of divine pre-determination and human free will. Indeed, Hasan is considered by many to be the founder of both Sufism and Islamic scholastic theology (kalam).
If, as the anecdotes suggest, Rabi‘a knew Hasan, he must have been very old at the time, and she very young. The crucial point in the Hasan and Rabi‘a stories is not their objective historicity, however, but the key Sufi concepts that are built upon the medieval Sufi convention of the spiritual contest in which two sages compete verbally with one another, one of them coming out as the wiser or more sincere. The humble former slave Rabi‘a continually wins in her jousts with Hasan, the most famous religious and intellectual figure of his time. What binds these stories together, and what links them with other anecdotes and sayings, is Rabi‘a’s ability to synthesize ascetic piety with theological concerns (two areas that seemed to remain compartmentalized with Hasan) into a new way of thinking that was to become the ground of Sufism.
This synthesis combined the Qur’anic doctrine of the unity of God (tawhid) with ascetic impulses and a continuing investigation of the issue of human free will and divind predetermination. For Rabi‘a, affirmation of one God was not a matter of mere verbal correctness. Divine unity could be authentically affirmed only by turning one’s entire life and consciousness toward that one deity. To consider anything else was, in effect, a form of idolatry. She constantly criticized Hasan and other spiritual leaders for becoming attached to the ascetic piety and treating it as an end in and of itself. Rabi‘a offered a devastating critique of those claiming to despise the world for the sake of God. She opined that if those who despised the world had truly achieved an affirmation of one God, they would not by paying enough attention to anything else, including the world, to bother despising it.
Thus, the doctrinal affirmation of one God as a theistic principle was combined with a spiritual quest in which only one thing could be the object of one’s concern. This combination led to Rabi‘a’s celebrated notion of sincerity (sidq), or sincere love. For Rabi‘a, sincerity is not compatible with acting out of hope for reward or fear of punishment.
The passages in the Qur’an on the day of judgment or moment of truth are among the most compelling and most beautiful examples of prophetic discourse. They are open to many interpretations. Yet by Rabi‘a’s time, it is clear that they had become associated in the popular mind with a complex topography of Heaven and Hell (with seven levels in each and various descriptions of the joys and torments of the inhabitants) and with a psychology of reward and punishment. Hasan of Basra was famous for his continual intensification of fear of Hell in meditation as a way of motivating and overcoming the appetites of the carnal self.
Rabi‘a rejected the entire edifice of reward and punishment. In numerous prayers, she is quoted as asking the Deity to deny her Paradise if she desires or worships out of hope for Paradise, and to condemn her to Hell if she worships out of fear of Hell. The most famous anecdote represents Rabi‘a as running down the path with fire in the one hand and water in the other. When asked what she was doing, Rabi‘a responded that she wished to burn Paradise and douse the fires of Hell, so that no one will ever love God except out of pure love, devoid considerations of reward and punishment. To be concerned with anything (even Heaven and Hell) beside the one God is in effect to affirm something else as God.
Rabi‘a was implacably consistent in her articulation of this notion of sincere love. When asked if she hated Satan, she responded no, she was too busy loving God to think about Satan. When asked if she loved the Prophet Muhammad, she said no, with the most profound respect to the Prophet, she had room for only One Beloved. To love another would be to take another being as one’s God.
Connected with this conception of sincerity was Rabi‘a’s rigorous understanding of the virtue of trust-in-God (tawakkul). In numerous anecdotes, Rabi‘a is depicted as not only refusing to plan for the future, but even to consider it. To make plans for the future, hoard up supplies, or build up furnishings is to fail to put one’s full trust in the Deity. It is also a contradiction of the rigorous affirmation of one God; to put one’s trust in one’s own plan is to make of that plan one’s God.
The resultant way of life and thought can be characterized as one of active acceptance (rida), that is, absolute acceptance of the infinite divine will. It is crucial to distinguish between Rabi‘a’s active notion of acceptance and passive resignation or fatalism. In several anecdotes, Rabi ‘a’ refuses to ask anything of any human creature, because to do so would violate the principle of trust-in-God and the unity of God. She goes on to refuse to ask the Deity for anything, on the grounds that the Deity knows her condition already, and has forewilled it. Such petition then would violate the principle of acceptance. Rather than leading to passivity or fatalism, this absolute acceptance is viewed as the key to authentic action. In the anecdotes about Rabi‘a it is this active acceptance that is the proof of her authenticity to those around her.
The depth of Rabi‘a’s sincerity acted as a protection for her in an often insecure world; as a freed woman she had more prerogatives for refusing marriage than other women, but she could not have led the public and vocal life she lived had she not been, in the words of ‘Attar, veiled by the veil of sincerity.
Ultimately, the major concepts of Rabi‘a’s thought are tied together in the ultimate intellectual and spiritual goal: extinction (fana’) of the ego-self in union with the Divine Beloved. It is only in such extinction that the extreme versions of trust, active acceptance, sincerity beyond hope for reward and fear of punishment, and true affirmation of divine unity can be attained. In such extinction, the Deity works in and through the human in the state of the annihilation of the ego-self.
The concept of the annihilation of the self in mystical union, central for all subsequent Sufi philosophy, would be further developed by the other major thinkers of early Sufism: Junayd (d. 910), Bistami (d. c. 875), Tustari (d. 896), and Hallaj (d. 922). Later Sufis such as Qushayri would go on to place concepts of trust, sincerity, acceptance, poverty, and divine unity into complex categories of “stations” (maqamat) and momentary states (ahwal), but the essential configuration is, according to the biographers of Rabi‘a’, the great achievement of this self-educated former slave girl of Basra. Ultimately, Rabi‘a ‘al-Adawiyya is recognized by Sufi tradition as central in forging the new synthesis of theology and ascesis that would come to be known as Sufism
Rābiʻa al-ʻAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya see Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya
Rābiʻa al-Basrī see Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya
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