Rabia al-Adawiyya: Love Without Fear or Hope of Reward

Rabia al-Adawiyya was born into poverty in Basra — present-day Iraq — around 714 CE, was orphaned young, and was for a time enslaved. She was freed, according to tradition, after her master saw a divine light surrounding her in prayer. She spent the rest of her long life in prayer, teaching, and writing, dying around 801 CE, and became one of the most celebrated Sufi mystics in the history of Islam.

She did not teach a comfortable doctrine.

Her central claim was that most religious practice was a sophisticated form of self-interest. If you avoid sin out of fear of hell — if the threat of punishment is what keeps you obedient — then you are not loving God; you are managing your own risk. If you perform acts of worship hoping for paradise — for the garden with rivers of milk and honey, the sensory perfections of eternal life — then you are not loving God; you are making a transaction. Both hell-avoidance and paradise-seeking are, in Rabia's framework, forms of spiritual selfishness.

The prayer for which she is most remembered is astonishingly blunt: O God, if I worship you out of fear of hell, then burn me in hell. If I worship you in hope of paradise, then exclude me from paradise. She is asking God to refuse her the rewards she is not seeking. This is not bravado — it is a logical statement of pure love's requirements. If the love is real, the consequences become irrelevant. If they are relevant, the love is not pure.

Attar, who compiled the Memorial of the Saints in the thirteenth century and included a long section on Rabia, records many stories that circle the same point. She was once seen in the marketplace with a bucket of water. Someone asked what she was doing. She said she was going to pour it on the flames of hell. Then they noticed the torch. What was that? I am going to set fire to paradise, she said, so that people will cease worshipping God out of hope and fear, and will instead worship him for his own sake alone.

Her theology had personal teeth. She was asked why she never married. She said: The marriage contract requires a husband who exists in this world. My existence has passed away from this world; I have ceased to belong to myself. I belong only to God. She was asked if she hated Iblis, the devil. She said she had been so occupied with loving God that she had no time left for hatred of anyone.

What Rabia identified — and what made her influential across eight centuries of Sufi thought — is the structural problem in any reward-based ethics: the person who does good to gain heaven is not, at bottom, good; they are prudent. Genuine goodness, like genuine love, cannot be purchased by the good it does the giver. Her prayer is still one of the most radical statements in the history of religious thought.