Rabia al-Adawiya, also known as Rabia Basri or Rabia of Basra, was an eighth-century Muslim mystic and teacher from Basra in southern Iraq. Sufi tradition honours her as the first to teach the love of God for His own sake — not from fear of Hell, not for the reward of Paradise. A freed slave who refused every offer of marriage, she became the most famous woman saint of Islam, and twelve centuries later poets, preachers and pop singers still quote her. This article is part of our guide to women in religion.
Who was Rabia al-Adawiya?
Rabia was an ascetic woman teacher who lived in or near Basra in the eighth century; that much is confirmed by early Basran authors who knew her reputation. Her names tell her history: al-Adawiya and al-Qaysiyya name the clan and tribe to which she belonged as a freed slave. The dates usually given — born around 714–717, died in 801 — come from much later sources, as the historian Rkia Elaroui Cornell points out. No written work has been conclusively traced to Rabia herself; what we have are her sayings and stories, recorded by others over several centuries.
Rabia Basri’s life story
The best-known account of her life comes from the Persian poet Farid al-Din Attar (twelfth–thirteenth century) in his Memorial of the Saints (Tazkirat al-Awliya). In his telling, Rabia was born into a poor family, the fourth daughter — hence the name Rabia, “the fourth”. After her parents died and famine struck Basra, she was separated from her sisters, stolen and sold as a slave. She worked by day and prayed through the nights. One night her master saw a light shining above her head while she prayed; realising she was a saint, he set her free.
She first withdrew into the desert, then lived in Basra in poverty and seclusion, teaching those who came to her. She never married. Among the suitors in the stories is even the governor of Basra, Muhammad ibn Sulayman al-Hashimi; she turned him down, as she turned down all the others, saying in substance that all of her belonged to God.
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Rabia and Hasan al-Basri
Many favourite stories pair Rabia with Hasan al-Basri, the great preacher of Basra, and in them she always has the last word. In one, Hasan spreads his prayer mat on the water and invites her to pray there; she throws hers into the air and says that both feats are things a fish or a fly can do, and the real work lies elsewhere. Historians note that there is no evidence the two ever met — Hasan died in 728, when Rabia was a child — so these stories are best read as teaching parables, not chronicle.
What did Rabia teach? The love of God for His own sake
Rabia’s teaching is pure, disinterested love of God, which later Sufis called mahabba and ishq. Before her, the renunciants of Basra were known above all for weeping, fear and repentance. Rabia turned the motive around: God should be loved because He is worthy of love, not because of what He gives or threatens.
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Her most famous prayer, in the form preserved by later writers, says in substance: if I worship You from fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; if I worship You in hope of Paradise, shut me out of Paradise; but if I worship You for Your own sake, do not withhold from me the sight of Your face.
The torch and the bucket of water
In another famous story, recorded in the fourteenth century by Aflaki, Rabia is seen running through the streets with a burning torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. Asked where she is going, she answers that she wants to set fire to Paradise and pour water on Hell, so that both disappear and people look to God without hope and without fear. The historian Cornell reads it as a literary and philosophical image rather than a historical event — which is exactly why it travelled so far.
How Rabia’s story reached Europe
Rabia was probably the first Sufi to enter European literature. At the end of the thirteenth century Jean de Joinville, the biographer of the French king Louis IX, told the story of a woman with a torch and a bowl of water, placing it in Damascus. In 1641 the French bishop Jean-Pierre Camus built a whole devotional book, Caritée, around it, to defend the doctrine of pure love. In 2025 the Spanish singer Rosalía referred to Rabia on her album Lux, in a song alluding to her wish to burn Paradise and quench Hell for the love of God.
Rabia on men, women and holiness
Several stories show Rabia meeting the claim that holiness belongs to men. In one of them, a group of men remind her that every virtue has been given to men, that prophethood never came to a woman. She answers, in substance, that women have never been so in love with themselves as men, and that no woman has ever claimed to be God. In a Sufi saying attributed to Hasan al-Basri, he spent a whole day and night with her in conversation, and “it never passed through my mind that I was a man, nor did it occur to her that she was a woman”.
Who were the women who did receive the title of prophet? → Female prophets in the Bible: names and stories
Where is Rabia buried?
According to the classical account, Rabia died in Basra, where she was buried. Another tradition, followed by Ibn Khallikan and several later authors, venerates a tomb on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the Zawiyat al-‘Adawiyya, as hers. The geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi held that the Jerusalem tomb belongs to a different, Syrian Rabia — the wife of the ascetic Ahmad ibn Abi al-Hawari — with whom the Basran saint was often confused.
Rabia and the other great women of Islam
Rabia held no office — she led no mosque and issued no fatwas. Her authority was the authority of holiness. In that she stands beside the women scholars of hadith and law who taught generations of men, from Aisha in the first Muslim century to Fatima al-Samarqandi in the twelfth. Their story is told in female imams and women scholars in Islam.
Rabia and reincarnation
Mainstream Islam teaches one earthly life and rejects the transmigration of souls, and Rabia’s sayings speak of the soul returning to God, not to a new body. Yet her central idea — that love, not fear of punishment or hope of reward, should move the soul — sounds close to what people who remember previous lives in regression often say: that the point of a life is learning to love, not to escape Hell. Traditions that do teach rebirth are compared in reincarnation beliefs across world religions and cultures; the Buddhist women who vowed to return life after life are in women in Buddhism.
Frequently asked questions
Is Rabia al-Adawiya the same as Rabia Basri?
Yes. “Basri” means “of Basra”, her city; “al-Adawiya” refers to her clan. She should not be confused with a later Syrian Sufi woman of the same name, the wife of Ahmad ibn Abi al-Hawari.
What is Rabia Basri famous for?
For teaching the love of God for His own sake, without fear of Hell or hope of Paradise, and for the story of the torch and the bucket of water.
Did Rabia write poetry?
Many poems are attributed to her, but scholars say their origin is unknown; no written work has been conclusively linked to her.
Was Rabia married?
No. According to all the stories she refused marriage so as to devote herself entirely to God.
More in this series: female rabbis, Pope Joan, women who founded religions. All topics: Women in Religion.
Sources
- Rkia Elaroui Cornell. Rabi’a from Narrative to Myth: The Many Faces of Islam’s Most Famous Woman Saint, Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya. London: Oneworld, 2019.
- Margaret Smith. Rabi’a the Mystic and Her Fellow-Saints in Islam. Cambridge University Press, 1928.
- Farid al-Din Attar. Muslim Saints and Mystics: Episodes from the Tadhkirat al-Auliya’, trans. A. J. Arberry. London: Routledge, 1966.
- Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami. Early Sufi Women, trans. Rkia Elaroui Cornell. Fons Vitae, 1999.
- Jean de Joinville. The Life of Saint Louis (c. 1309).
- Salah Stétié. Râbi’a de feu et de larmes. Paris: Albin Michel, 2015.
- Konul Bunyadzade. “The Sufi Phenomenology of Love Based on the Thoughts of Rabia Al-Adawiyya and Edith Stein”. International Journal of Islamic Thought 18, 2020, 27–33. doi:10.24035/ijit.18.2020.178
- Patricia Enedudu Idoko. “Practical Mysticism in Islam and Christianity: A Comparative Study of Rabia al-Adawiyya and Catherine of Genoa”. Religions 15(9), 2024, 1030. doi:10.3390/rel15091030