Rabi'a al-Adawiyya

Rabi'a bint Isma'il al-Adawiyya was a great Sufi and famous devout woman of Basra. Kahhala says she reached a high station in the fine points of the Sufi path and that the leading Sufis of her time consulted her on them. ¹

Kahhala relates that Sufyan al-Thawri used to say, "Take us to the teacher of manners; I find no one to rest with once I leave her", and that when he said in her presence "O my sorrow!" she told him: "Do not lie — say, O how little my sorrow!" ¹

He quotes Ibn al-Jawzi that she was perceptive, and that a sign of her understanding was her saying: "I ask God's forgiveness for how little truth there is in my saying, I ask God's forgiveness." ² Among her sayings: the lover of God does not cease his moaning and longing until he rests with his Beloved; and among her counsels: hide your good deeds as you hide your bad ones. ² A man once brought her forty dinars to help with her needs; she wept and said she was ashamed to ask this world of the One who owns it, so how could she want it from one who does not? ^{2 3}

She wept much and prayed through the night, taking a light sleep at her prayer place when dawn broke; the place where she prostrated was like a pool from her tears, she trembled when death was mentioned, and kept her shroud ready. ^{2 3} By the age of eighty she had become "like a worn-out water-skin", nearly falling when she walked. ³

Kahhala cites Massignon that Rabi'a al-Adawiyya and Rabi'a al-Qaysiyya were ascetics of the Basran school whose zeal for renunciation led them to treat various mystical states, and that researchers on sainthood regard Rabi'a as the greatest woman saint. ² Mustafa Abd al-Raziq disagrees, finding it forced to credit her with taking up fine questions of law and theology, but calls her the first to lay down the principles of love and sorrow in the structure of Islamic Sufism, so that what Sufi literature later poured out on these two themes is "a breath of her breath". ²

When death came she told her servant Abda not to announce it and to shroud her in the hair cloak she wore for night prayer, and Abda did so. ³ Kahhala says she was buried in Jerusalem in 135 AH; his note adds that al-Nujum al-Zahira gives 180 AH, and another report 185 AH. ³

• Her date of death is disputed (135, 180 or 185 AH), and burial in Jerusalem is as Kahhala gives it; many reports about her come from later sources, and the museum gives them as attributed to Kahhala and his sources (Ibn Khallikan, Sifat al-Safwa, al-Sha'rani and others).

Ibn al-Jawzi gives her entry in Sifat al-Safwa among the women ascetics of Basra (no. 588): from Abd Allah ibn Isa, that he saw light on her face; from Muhammad ibn Amr, a description of her house when she was eighty — a reed mat, a rack of Persian reed, a felt that was her bed and her prayer place, and a peg on which her shroud hung. ⁴ He relates that when a man asked her to pray for him she pressed herself against the wall and said, "Who am I, God have mercy on you? Obey your Lord and call on Him, for He answers the distressed"; that she told Sufyan al-Thawri, when he asked God for safety, that safety from the world means leaving what is in it; and, from her servant Abda bint Abi Shawwal, that she prayed all night with a light sleep at dawn, and that Abda saw her in a dream about a year after her death in a green robe of brocade. ^{4 5}