The torch and the water

Rabia al-Adawiyya walked the streets of Basra one day with a lit torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. She said she was going to burn paradise and put out hell, so that men might worship Allah for the sake of Allah alone.

Rabia bint Isma'il al-Adawiyya was born about 717 CE into extreme poverty in Basra, then one of the great cities of the Abbasid caliphate. She was the fourth daughter of her family, rabia means "fourth" in Arabic, and her name is the record of that ordinariness. Her parents died in a famine when she was still a child. She and her three sisters were sold or taken into slavery.

She was owned by a man of Basra who used her for hard labour. She rose long before dawn each day to work, and stole the moments before her master woke to pray. Her master, according to the classical hagiographies preserved by Attar and Jami and the great Sufi biographers, saw her one night in the corner of the courtyard with a light around her head as she made sujud. He interpreted the light as a sign from Allah, feared to keep her in slavery, and freed her the next morning.

She was in her twenties by then. She had no family, no wealth, no husband. She had lived a decade of forced labour. She could easily have accepted marriage from any of the men of Basra who offered, and many did. Al-Hasan al-Basri, the great scholar and ascetic of Basra, is said in one tradition to have proposed. Abd al-Wahid ibn Zayd, another famous ascetic, proposed. Sufyan ath-Thawri, the founder of a legal school, is said to have proposed. She refused every one.

Her argument was consistent across every refusal. She said her heart had room in it for only one Beloved. She had already given it to Allah. She could not, in fairness to a human husband, give him a divided attention. She said: "O men who speak to me of marriage, hear me. The soul cannot love two things at once. I have no soul left over to give to a man. Do not ask me to lie to you."

Her poetry has survived in fragments preserved by the later Sufi tradition. Her most famous prayer, preserved by Attar and cited by every subsequent Muslim mystic:

The theological argument compressed into these three lines was revolutionary. The dominant framework of early Islamic spirituality was reward and punishment: fear of hell, hope of paradise, worship as the transaction that secured the one and avoided the other. Rabia's argument was that this transactional framework degraded worship. To worship Allah for fear of hell was to worship one's own fear. To worship Allah for hope of paradise was to worship one's own hope. Neither of these was worshipping Allah. Real worship, mahabba, love, could exist only when the transaction was set aside and Allah was worshipped for who Allah was, not for what Allah might give or withhold.

She once walked through the streets of Basra with a lit torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. Someone stopped her and asked what she was doing. She answered:

The image has become one of the most-cited in Islamic mystical literature. It captures Rabia's whole theology in a single gesture. She was walking to abolish the transactional framework of worship at its source.

She lived to about 84 and died in Basra around 801 CE. Her tomb was for many centuries a site of pilgrimage. It is now uncertain, one candidate is on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, another in Basra itself. What is preserved is her poetry, her sayings, and her theology, which passed through the classical Sufi tradition, Attar, Rumi, Ibn Arabi, Bishr al-Hafi, and the whole Baghdadi mystical school, and into the mainstream Sunni piety of the Muslim world.

Her theology of mahabba is what the Sunni ulama came to accept as the highest station of the pious. Al-Ghazali quotes her repeatedly. Rumi's Persian Masnavi opens with themes she had articulated four centuries earlier. Every Muslim mother today who tells her child uhibbu Allah, I love Allah, is speaking in a theological register that Rabia opened.

What the story teaches

Rabia al-Adawiyya is remembered because she demonstrated, in a single life, that Islamic spirituality is not exhausted by fear and hope. The transactional framework of reward and punishment is real and Quranically established, Allah promises paradise and warns of hellfire in every surah. But Rabia's insight, at the beginning of the second Islamic century, was that this framework is preparatory. It gets a soul to a certain point. Past that point, the soul that continues to worship out of self-interest, fear of loss, hope of gain, has not yet begun to worship Allah at all. It is still worshipping itself. Real worship, in Rabia's theology, is the moment when the transactional calculus stops and the soul stands in front of Allah for the sake of Allah alone. This is the founding statement of the Islamic mystical tradition and one of the great contributions of a Muslim woman to the classical theology of the ummah. Every Muslim who has ever prayed in the night not to be saved from hell, not to be rewarded with paradise, but simply because Allah is deserving of the prayer, is standing in Rabia's line.