An excerpt from the book, Love Poems from God by Daniel Ladinsky.
Rabia
"Rabia of Basra (c. 717-801) is without doubt the most popular and influential of female Islamic saints and a central figure in the Sufi tradition. She was born nearly five hundred years before Rumi, and although it is rarely said, she, perhaps more then any other poet, influenced his writings.
The sensuousness of Rabia's poetry may be a bit shocking to some, though it was probably more so in its original. Even conservative scholarly translations cannot get around its, at times, graphic eroticism. Many myths surround her life and poems, but one has been recently confirmed - while Rabia was quite young she became separated from her parents and while wandering homeless, she was stolen and sold into prostitution. She was forced to work as one might in a brothel for many years.
She wrote, "What a place for trials and transformation did my Lover put me, but never once did He look upon me as if I were impure. Dear sisters, all we do in the world, whatever happens, is bringing us closer to God."
Rabia may be a timely spiritual voice for women of this century, especially for any woman (or man) who has had to suffer the emotionally crippling degradation of unwanted touch. She was both physically and sexually abused from an early age, yet still became on of the greatest women saints-and poets-known to history."
If you have not yet experienced the extasy of Rabia's poetry, it is my profound honor to expose you to it now. If you are familiar with Rabia, I hope you fall in love with her all over again.
Love is
the perfect stillness
and the greatest excitement, and most profound act,
and the word almost as complete
as His name.
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