Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, voice of divine love
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Sufism is the mystical dimension of Islam. Experienced by certain companions of the Prophet Muhammad in his lifetime, this dimension received the name ‘Sufism’ some decades after his death. The notion then referred to individual experiences. As a spiritual current, Sufism emerged in the second century of the Hegira (that is, the eighth century), and it was in this setting that a woman accomplished an inner journey that would make her known as one of the greatest figures of Sufism. Her name: Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya (713-801).
Rabi’a was born some seventy years after the death of the Prophet of Islam, into a family of Basra (present-day Iraq) that was very poor and very pious. She was barely out of childhood when she was left an orphan. She then became the slave of a wealthy merchant, who one day came upon her in prayer, bathed in a sacred light. Deeply moved by the sight, he resolved to free her so that she might devote herself to her one true Master and Lord. And so began for her the life to which she aspired: a life of extreme asceticism, meditation and prayer.
Rabi’a gave a decisive impulse to the spiritual dimension of Islam. Her contemporaries, and the scholars who have since examined her life, all recognised in her a very high degree of realisation, one that allowed her to place the love of God above every other religious and spiritual approach, professing what specialists of Islam call ‘the doctrine of absolute love’. Three great themes stand out in Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya’s sacred journey: renunciation of all that is not God, sincerity and, of course, love.
Renunciation
Among the mystics of the time, asceticism appears as the first step in the experience of the spiritual journey, the tool par excellence for taming the ego. Self-denial and the renouncing of the world’s pleasures are practised in order to reach the highest degrees of spirituality. Rabi’a was one of the first mystics of Islam to go beyond the traditional ascetic approach. True, she lived alone, ate little, slept little, preferring to spend her nights and days in prayer. Yet with her, asceticism took on the colours of a genuine mysticism of love, a joyful renunciation that bore witness to a sincerity and a nobility of conduct towards God without which there can be no true love. In detaching herself from the beings and things of this world, she was only bringing her outer life into harmony with the object of her quest: to rise towards God and to melt into perfect union with Him.
Despite her great poverty, Rabi’a accepted no alms: ‘How could I accept anything from a person who does not truly possess it, since it belongs to God? I should be ashamed to ask worldly goods of the One to Whom they belong; how, then, could I ask them of people to whom they do not belong?’
Renouncing earthly goods and pleasures in favour of an exclusive attachment to God also took the form, in this great Sufi saint, of her choice to remain unmarried. For one thing, she held that she was not her own to give, since she belonged to God; for another, every marriage, she maintained, must be founded on love. And her love was wholly given over to God. Solitary by choice, she found her joy and satisfaction in divine love:
My joy, my Desired, my Stay,
My Companion, my Provision, my Pole!
You are the Breath of my heart, You are my Every Hope;
O my Intimate, my longing for You is my provision for the road.
Sincerity
‘If there were neither paradise nor hell, would you then not serve the Most High Lord?’ This was how Rabi’a upbraided those around her, devout people and mystics included. True sincerity towards God, she proclaimed, is expressed by going beyond the notions of reward and punishment to become pure adoration of the divine Beauty and Grandeur. Hence her prayer: ‘O my God, if I worship You for fear of Your hell, burn me in its flames; and if I worship You from desire for paradise, bar me from entering it. But if I worship You for love of You alone, then do not deprive me of contemplating Your eternal beauty!’
It is hard to surpass so great a sincerity. And yet Rabi’a never ceased to doubt her own. That is why she urged upon others what she urged upon herself: ‘When we ask God’s forgiveness, we must also beg His pardon for the lack of conviction in our asking.’
Absolute love
The whole life of Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya was shawq, an ardent longing to meet the divine Being. Her passion for God made her live in turn ecstasy, contemplation, reverential fear and intimacy. Her love for Him was so deep and so exclusive that nothing could draw her away from it. So it was that she closed her shutters in springtime, not contemplating the newborn flowers, preferring to lose herself in the contemplation of their Creator.
This founder of the doctrine of love, which she associates with the unveiling of the beatific vision, does not claim to have attained the absolute love of which she would nonetheless become the emblem. In a poetic dialogue with God, she declares that she loves Him for Himself, but also with a share of self-interest. She speaks of love ‘for her own happiness’; al-Ghazali (1058-1111), many years later, would call this interested love, instinctive love, which loves God in order to obtain His favour, His grace, His reward. What Rabi’a hints at being selfish concerns in fact her own happiness, which nonetheless resounds with devotions and thanksgiving towards God:
With two loves, I love You: a love of passion
And a love of high merit of which You are worthy.
Through the love of passion I have lost all memory
Of any beloved who is not You.
Through the love of merit that alone is worthy of You,
Let Your veils fall, that I may see You!
Yet for these two loves I look for no praise:
For the one and the other, let the praise be Yours!
Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya’s example aroused great admiration, not only among the people of her time but also in such celebrated Sufis as Ibn ’Arabi (1165-1240) and Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273). Her renown for an exclusive and absolute love of God, incompatible with any half-measure, also impressed Jean de Joinville (1224-1317), who accompanied King Louis IX of France (1214-1270) to the Near East. Joinville brought several of her deeds and sayings back to France, among them the famous scene, popularised three centuries later by the Catholic writer Jean-Pierre Camus (1584-1652), of a woman walking through the streets with a torch in one hand and a waterskin in the other. To those who asked why she wandered about like that, she invariably replied that she longed to set paradise ablaze with the torch and to put out hell with the waterskin, so that God might be loved for Himself and not out of fear of hell or desire for paradise. Here, with exceptional clarity, we see the transmission of a single theme between two cultures and two religions, so true is it that the experience of divine love has a universality that transcends nations and faiths.
Karim Ben Driss, article originally published in “Cahiers de spiritualité ignatienne”, January 2011, Québec.
