RĀBIʿAH AL-ʿADAWĪYAH

RĀBIʿAH AL-ʿADAWĪYAH (d. ah 185/801 ce), was an Arab mystic, poet, and Muslim saint. Even though she attained great age and fame, little is known of Rābiʿah's personal life. Her name indicates that she was a fourth (rābiʿah ) daughter, probably of a poor family. For some time she was a house servant in Basra, but, thanks to her amazing piety, her master released her from bondage. Her life thereafter, marked by austerity and otherworldliness, was spent largely in retirement, although her sanctity attracted many who sought her prayers and teachings. Rābiʿah of Basra is regarded as the person who introduced the concept of pure love of God into the ascetic way of life prevalent among God-seeking Muslims during the second century ah.

It seems probable that Rābiʿah met some of the well-known ascetics of her time, among them Ibrahim ibn Adham of Balkh (d. 770?). However, the stories that connect her with the ascetic preacher Ḥasan al-Baṣrī, and even claim that he proposed marriage to her, are pure invention, for Ḥasan (whose constant call to renunciation and fear of God certainly colored the spiritual atmosphere in Basra) died in 728, when Rābiʿah was only about ten years old.

Many legends have been woven around her. When she performed the pilgrimage, the Kaʿbah is said to have moved forward to greet her, and her donkey, which had died on the road, was miraculously revived. But Rābiʿah, faithful to the ascetic tradition, and extremely afraid of hellfire, rejected the common belief that she was capable of performing miracles. Rather, she considered such miracles as satanic temptations.

Rābiʿah's greatest contribution to the development of Sufism lay in her insistence upon pure love of God, emphasizing the Qurʾanic verse "He loves them and they love him" (surah 5:59). She expressed her feelings sometimes in short, artless poems, sometimes in beautiful prayers, for she spent long nights in intimate conversation with her beloved Lord. In daily life, she experienced remorse when her thoughts strayed from him. Her heart was filled with love of God, with no room left even for a special love of the Prophet. Asked whether she hoped for Paradise, she answered with the Arabic proverb "Al-jār thumma al-dār" ("First the neighbor, then the house"), meaning that she thought only of him who had created Paradise and Hell.

Thus arose the best-known legend about her: having been seen carrying a flaming torch in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other, she explained that this symbolic act meant that she would set Paradise on fire and pour water into Hell, "so that these two veils may disappear and nobody may worship God out of fear of Hell or hope for Paradise, but solely for his own beauty." This tale, which reached Europe in the early fourteenth century, is the basis of several short stories, mystical and otherwise, in Western literature. Other accounts, too, eventually became known in the West, at least in nineteenth-century England, as Richard Monckton Milnes's poems The Sayings of Rabiah prove.

In the Islamic world, Rābiʿah was highly praised by ʿAṭṭār (d. 1221) in his Tadhkirat al-awliyāʾ (Biographies of the Saints), where he states that a woman who walks in the path of God cannot be called merely (i. e., deprecatively) "woman." Some centuries later, however, Jāmī (d. 1492) reminded his readers that the fact that the sun is feminine in Arabic does not distract from its grandeur. Certainly, her gender never clouded Rābiʿah's renown. The legend that she refused to go out to admire nature on a radiant spring day, preferring to contemplate the beauty of the Creator in the darkness of her house, has been retold for centuries, often without mentioning her name, and her life has even served as scenario for at least one Arab movie. Her name is still used to praise exceptionally pious women.

See Also

Sufism.

Bibliography

Modern Arabic scholars, among them ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī, have devoted studies to Rābiʿah, but the only comprehensive study in a Western language is Margaret Smith's Rābiʿah the Mystic, and Her Fellow Saints in Islam (1928; reprint, Cambridge, 1984).

Annemarie Schimmel (1987)