Rabia al-Adawiyya of Basra, who died late in the eighth century, is the best known woman in the early history of Muslim piety. She is remembered as a freed slave who lived poor and unmarried, refused offers of marriage in order to keep her attention where she wanted it, and taught that God should be loved for himself. The saying most often attached to her asks that if she worships 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 worships God for his own sake he not withhold his face from her.
Almost everything told about her comes from collections made two or three centuries later, above all by Attar, and the earliest layers are thin. She is therefore a real historical person around whom a large devotional literature accumulated, and the atlas records both facts rather than treating the stories as biography.
Basra also shaped a strand of Islam that survives with a distinct legal and theological identity. After the Kharijites broke with Ali over arbitration, their more moderate wing settled in the city and organised quietly under scholars who avoided armed rebellion. From that circle missionaries were sent out as bearers of knowledge, and the communities they founded became the Ibadi populations of Oman, of the Mzab in Algeria, of Djerba and of Zanzibar, which persist today with their own imamate tradition and their own body of law.