Rabia of Basra
Iraqi sufi and poet · Writers · Lived 710 to 801 · aged 91
Rabia of Basra is read about 508 times a day, in 54 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 7 October 2026
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Something wrong?An eighth-century woman from Basra who remade devotion into something closer to love than law - her poetry and mystical teachings bent Sufism toward longing, not just submission, and earned her a place among the tradition's earliest and most revered voices.
Also in Deutsch
Photos 1
In their own words 6
, O God! If I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell
I want to put out the fires of Hell, and burn down the rewards of Paradise. They block the way to Allah.
Love, for Rabia, is the basis of spiritual perfection at all the stages on the journey to God. She teaches to love God for the sake of God.
About this person
Rābiʼa al-ʼAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya was born around 716 CE and spent her life in Basra. A freed slave of the Qays ibn ʿAdī tribe, she carried the nisba al-Qaysīyya and the kunya Umm ʿAmr. She became a poet and one of the first Sufi mystics, writing and teaching at a time when the movement was still taking shape. Her work helped establish a language of divine love that would echo through centuries of Islamic mysticism. She is counted among the three preeminent Qalandars - wandering ascetics who renounced the world. She died in 801 CE, leaving a legacy that outlasted empires.
Writers born in the 710s 6
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