Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya

Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya is the most famous woman of early Sufism, and one of the first to make love the centre of the mystical life. She lived in Basra, in Iraq, in the eighth century; most sources give her death as 801, in the year 185 of the Islamic calendar. Almost everything known of her comes from later collections of sayings and stories, the earliest written decades or centuries after her death, and it is hard to separate history from legend.

According to Farīd al-Dīn ʿAṭṭār’s Memorial of the Saints, written in the thirteenth century, she was born into a poor family, sold into slavery as a child, and freed by her master after he saw a light above her as she prayed through the night. She is said to have lived in poverty and celibacy, refused offers of marriage, and been visited by the ascetics and scholars of Basra, who asked her advice.

She left no writings. The sayings and short poems attributed to her are among the best known in Sufism, and she became the model of the woman saint and of the lover of God. The English scholar Margaret Smith’s study of 1928 brought her to Western readers.