Rabia of Basra

Individualism is how one comes to understand and experience  the most intimate spiritual realization with divinity. Personal acts of devotion coupled with charity reveal one's personal interaction with divinity, which we expect to be cheerful with a note of contentment upon the wearer of the cloak of sanctity. If one's God is compassionate and merciful, loving and kind, then the devotee would most certainly manifest these features in their own personal life. Their demeanor would be calm and accepting, and such a person would eschew harshness in all its forms. The face of true faith, regardless of the faith path one is following, thus should reflect the soul searching, the love affair and the longing one experiences with one's beloved.

Organized religion imposes ritual and rules which are to be obeyed by a community and if necessary, the devotee punished somehow if these acts of organized piety are ignored. While many can be and are moved by organized, massed acts of piety, any religious teaching acknowledges each individual and their personal path to divinity, even though that person is part of a huge group al seemingly seeking the same thing. Often however, the group effort becomes just a ritual to be performed with everyone following the same rules, creating a group think that turns fellow worshippers into group spies, who are ever ready to reprimand the individual who might step out of bounds. For the spiritual traveler seeking the higher callings and realms of divinity, such an atmosphere of rigidity and ritual become a bore, and the individual becomes spiritually depressed. Enter then, the mystical path.

Rabia of Basra was born in what is now Iraq somewhere between the years 714 and 718 AD, in the city of Basra, hence her name. This era was a time when Islam as a religion was still in its infancy, barely one hundred years after the death of its founder Mohammed. There were no Islamic schools of law and thought yet created, therefore the religion was not yet formalized. The Quran said by Muslim sources to traditionally have been compiled about forty years after Mohammed, may not have been fully compiled as of this time either, if we are to believe some recent historians who question the long accepted Muslim narrative about the compiling of their holy scripture. Nonetheless, modern historians have shed new light on the history of early Islam, quoting not the already popular Muslim sources but the writings and observations of those who came in contact with the Arabs who themselves were building an empire, namely the Umayyad caliphate. Historian Tom Holland notes in his studies that one cannot find any evidence of the use of the term Muslim or Islam, nor mentions of Mohammed in the first 100 years after he supposedly lived, leading us to ponder the theory that Mohammed and Islam are creations of the Arabs themselves during this time of their military and political rise on the world scene. Just as none can actually prove that Abraham, Moses, or Jesus actually lived when they did as all we have are the written accounts of what supposedly took place, in the form of stories, so none can prove that Mohammed actually lived in Arabia, having died as is claimed in 632 AD. Of course Muslims take offense with this just as Christians might be offended about the question of Jesus' reality. But faith is much more than supposed facts or theories which have been cemented in people's minds by scribes working for political minded rulers seeking to unite and kingdom or empire utilizing religion to achieve that. As in the ancient mythologies, there is the hero who does something profound in his or her day and leaves deeds to be retold by others who thought those deeds and the person worthy of remembrance. Like all the mythical heroes of the ancient epics, these special beings may have actually lived, or not. What is important is the message they share and represent, and the teachings which are attributed to them. This is why such belief and devotion is called faith, and not fact, and it is faith that guides and illuminates whole societies.

The Umayyads burst out of Arabia a few decades after the death of Mohammed, after that is, fighting a civil war among themselves for the control of what was supposedly Mohammed's domain. His career was one of struggling to bring the word of Abraham to his semi nomadic and pagan people. This was not an intellectual society where he could persuade by debate and discussion the people to his teachings, but one in which oral poets sang songs of the deeds of warriors who engaged in bloody raids on each other's tribal dwellings, stealing camels and sheep and sometimes women and children to be kept for ransom or for slavery. Mohammed fought for ten years, then finally entered Mecca and proclaimed the one God of Abraham for his people. The pagan Meccans were given the choice to convert, which of course they did. But their descendants did not forget that they were the lords of Mecca and once were the powerful rulers of that trading city. They were not going to forget their embarrassment by Mohammed, and after he died they began to bicker as to who would rule the new unified Arab state. A civil war broke out, which saw many of the members of Mohammed's family killed by the descendants of the Meccan pagan families. However, all during the time of Mohammed's wars with the pagans, there were supposedly times when his speeches and sermons taught actual faith and religion, charity and compassion. Both the spiritual and political aspects of that early time became part of what the world would eventually know of as Islam. The victorious Umayyads, utilizing Mohammed's genius for unifying diverse and feuding tribes, created a new unifying factor in the form of a religion, and marched on to conquer an empire that would eventually exceed the combined size of the Roman and Persian empires. They would rule much of the known world from Spain to China, and in that empire dozens of peoples and ideologies would rub elbows and create new forms of thought and faiths. In history, societies become distilled like sweet wine, and eventually give off a new taste and aroma, but only after the harshness of military campaigns and political intrigue.

In this early period of Islamic civilization, the cities of that Umayyad empire teamed with people who clung to an assortment of religious faiths including various Christian sects, Jews, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, Sabeans and others. A booming economy and the order set in place by the Umayyads in the fertile crescent region, heretofore devastated by centuries of wars between the Roman and Persian empires, was welcome indeed. The new religion of the conquerors, Islam, had few rules and laws. The 'people of the book' as Christians, Jews and Sabeans were considered, paid a poll tax for protection and thus were free to keep their religious practices. While this sounds odd today and would eventually become corrupt and oppressive under Islamic rule, paying to keep the right to pray as one wishes for the time was viewed as novel. If one studies the religious history of early America, we would note that under British colonial law all subjects who were non members of the Anglican Church had to pay a poll tax for the right to pray in their own tradition. If a minster or deacon of some subject church died, the congregation had ninety days to replace him, and if none could be found all the congregants had to convert to the Anglican faith. Thank the founding fathers for their revolutionary views about religion!

Rabia was born to a poor family. Her name is simple, as it means the fourth, as she was the fourth child in the family. Her birth has become tied up with prophecies and dreams, but of course this can be but mythology. We do know that she became interested in spirituality, her city an important port which saw people of various faiths and ethnicities interacting and sharing their views. A famine overtook Basra when she was a teenager, and she went into the desert in imitation of the Christian mystics and became an ascetic. it should be remembered that Basra as a port saw ships coming in from the Indian ocean, with Hindus and Buddhists among the crews. She developed what was called 'pure and unconditional love for divinity', among a number of other ascetics which were blossoming at the time in the region. Just as Christianity developed out of a desire for Jews to attain to a personal relationship with the Holy One rather than depend on strict laws and rules, so did adherents of this new and simple monotheistic Arabian religion want something more from their contact with a stern Allah of the desert. These mystics became eventually known as Sufis, so called for the simple woolen cloaks they wore in preference over silken robes and the jewelry the upper classes would lavish as a result of their imperialist success. These mystics were not interested in the political and military tales of Mohammed's wars with the pagans, but rather sought the spiritual teachings he spoke of in his sermons, and those of other religious communities which he himself acknowledged. This of course was contrary to the empire building Islamism of the conquerors, and this contrast of opposites has been within Islam ever since. 

The Quran can be read as a literal reading, word for word being the very word of God, and these words are meant for all time. Thus the jihad can be called by imams and the verses that tell of the war against the pagans of Mecca repeated, and were repeated for centuries thereafter. But the Sufis saw the holy words differently. If Allah is vast then so must be his words, so vast that each verse in the Quran, the Sufis claim, has eighteen thousand meanings. People interpreting the holy book like this have little time for war and conquest, not to mention that they read the verses about Mohammed's jihad campaigns as pertinent to their time and place, and these events happened, in Rabia's day, a hundred years before.

So the message of these mystics was one of love and devotion to God and his signs. Service to his creatures was considered a form of devotion, giving away one's wealth or even a simple smile could be charity. Rabia, through her acts of prayer, fasting and devotion, was in love with God and all associated with him. When asked if she prayed for a reward she said she 'desired that she be singled out on the day of resurrection by Mohammed himself, who would then announce to all they should take note of the piety of this woman, who inspires people to do the same'. I find it interesting here that while literalist Muslims, living according to the rules and laws established centuries after Rabia in the form of what is known as Sharia, follow a hard and stern pagan slaying Mohammed who married a young teen when he was fifty, Rabia sees something else in Mohammed. She understand the man as a teacher and unifier, not a military leader. And she accepts the essence of Mohammed the man, not Mohammed the divine being, which Muslims have turned him into. In his career, Mohammed pointed to the worship of God, not worship of himself. He was a special being to Rabia, no doubt, but he was not the object of her affection and love, which was reserved for Allah alone. Rabia was ahead of her time, in that she was able to interpret her faith as a viable, loving and caring faith rather than as a politicized set of harsh dogmas meant to encourage rigidity and imbalance in the Muslim community and the world. 

While imams throughout the world today still preach hatred of Shaitan, the Devil, Rabia ignored such evaluations. She was famously asked if she harbored hate in her heart for the Devil, to which she replied; "Only the love of God fills my being, therefore there is no room there for hatred of the Devil or anything else. 

One day she was seen running through the city carrying a buket of water in one hand and a pot of fire in the other. When asked what she was up to, she said that she wanted "to put out the fires of hell and burn down the rewards of paradise, as both these things are obstacles to knowing and loving God". She wanted to worship God for what God is, the source of all love and beauty, and not for a reward or for honor. When the great Sheikh al Basri asked her how she was able to perform miracles and cure the sick through her intimacy with God she responded "you know of the how, but I know of the howless".

For Rabia, God was everywhere and everything, and since this was what she believed, then harming people or creatures or committing violence had no place in the world. The mosque and the church, synagogue and temple all vibrated with the same name and light of the divine holy one, thus all were a brother and sisterhood of lovers. She is considered to be the first Sufi mystic, and set much in the foundations of what would become the great mystical paths of the Islamic world. Indeed Rabia, love conquers all.

A lovely modern song based on the words of Rabia of Basra, by Ani Zonneveld...

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIB0r1GLzwk