Rabia al-Adawiyya

The story most often told about Rabia has her walking through Basra carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. Asked what she is doing, she says she means to set fire to paradise and put out the flames of hell, so that both veils will be lifted and God may be worshipped for himself alone, and not out of hope of reward or fear of punishment.

Whether or not she ever said it, the story states her position exactly, and that position is her contribution to Islamic spirituality. Early ascetic piety had been built on fear, on the reckoning to come and the fires waiting for the negligent. Rabia is the point at which the tradition turns to love as its governing term. The prayers ascribed to her make the distinction explicitly, asking 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 for God's own sake he not withhold his everlasting beauty.

Everything else about her follows from that. She refused offers of marriage, including from men of standing, on the ground that she had no attention to spare. Asked whether she hated the devil, she is said to have replied that her love of God left no room in her to hate anything. The refusals are not asceticism for its own sake. They are the consequence of an exclusive attachment, and later Sufi writing on mahabba, love, begins from her.

Nothing written by Rabia survives, and it is not certain that she wrote. What exists is a body of sayings, prayers and stories transmitted by others, first in scattered form and then gathered by later collectors, of whom the most influential is Attar, writing his prose Memorial of the Saints some four centuries after her death.

The result is a figure whose historical outline is thin and whose literary presence is enormous. The standard life has her born poor in Basra, orphaned, sold into slavery, and freed by a master who saw a light around her while she prayed at night. Each of those elements is a recognisable hagiographical motif, and the biography as it stands cannot be treated as a record. What can be said with confidence is that a woman of that name lived in eighth century Basra, that she was regarded as an authority in her own lifetime by men who were themselves regarded as authorities, and that sayings were being attributed to her early.

Her position in the tradition is worth stating plainly for what it settled. Sufi literature, which is otherwise overwhelmingly male, placed a woman at the origin of its central doctrine and did not treat that as requiring explanation or defence. When later writers wanted to argue that sanctity is not a function of sex, they cited her, and the citation was accepted. The atlas holds the figure and the source problem together, because both are part of what she is.