About Rabi´a

About
Rabi´a al-Adawiyya

Rabi´a al-Adawiyya is an Islamic saint. She is believed to have lived from 717 to 801 AD in what is now Iraq. While a poor orphan she was captured by a slave trader who proceeded to sell her into slavery. As a slave she was kept busy with her household duties until night, but once night time released her from her chores she devoted herself to prayer, going without sleep to do so. One night her master caught sight of her absorbed in prayer; he was astonished to see a light miraculously appear over her head which illuminated the entire house. Terrified he went back to his room, where he sat in wonder till daybreak. At dawn he approached Rabi´a, told her what he had seen, and gave her her freedom. Once free she moved to the desert where she devoted herself to prayer. As her holiness became more widely known, numerous individuals beat a path to her door seeking her spiritual direction.

Once she became renowned, she received numerous offers of marriage. In reply to the marriage proposal of the Amir of Basra, she said:

I'm not interested, really, in "possessing all you own,"
Nor in "making you my slave,"
Nor in having my attention distracted from
God even for a split second.

Islam has embraced Rabi´a even though it typically frowns upon unmarried life and withdrawal from society as a path to God.

With respect to his book, Doorkeeper of the Heart: Versions of Rabi´a, Charles Upton says:

... the poems and fables in this book are based on sayings attributed to Rabi´a, or stories about her, which have passed through a long line of Sufi historians, commentators, and translators for almost thirteen hundred years, during which time anything that was not already a poem has gotten so close to poetry, through the refinement of re-telling, that I was inspired to take the final step.
In producing these versions of Rabi´a, I have in most cases been faithful to the literal meaning of my English sources. When I departed from the literal, I did so in four ways: by extending a statement into a mataphor; by adding (in a few cases) a new image or statement to bridge a weak place in the original; by radically compressing a loose prose paragraph into verse; and (in a very few cases) by following a spark struck off the flint of the original, when I thought I saw beneath the skin of the text, and wrote what I saw.
(p. 18)