Talk:Rabia Basri

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 August 2019 and 16 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Malix27.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 07:40, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Move requested

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved per request. - GTBacchus^(talk) 10:59, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

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Rabia al-Adawiyya → Rabia Basri — She is more commonly known as Rabia Basri. —  Hamza  ^{[ talk ]} 23:09, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

• Comment. Another common usage is Rabia al-Basri. But Rabia al-Adawiyya is definitely the inappropriate title for this article.—  Hamza  ^{[ talk ]} 23:20, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Saint?

I am confused with the notion of "Muslim Saint" in this article. The mainstream Islam does not recognize anyone as Saint, see saint. I suggest to remove the word saint from the article. Taha bahadori (talk) 21:21, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

Seems to be used here: Wali. -Jooojay (talk) 17:49, 18 September 2018 (UTC)

Sufism refers to saints. What is "mainstream Islam"? Sunni or Shia? Islam maybe isn't as fractured as Christianity but it has more than one "stream." Pascalulu88 (talk) 21:15, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

error in last anecdote?

The last anecdote says:

Rabia said, "You traversed it in ritual prayer (Salat) but with personal supplication."

I can't find the source of this story, but should the "with" possibly be "without"? It does not make much sense to me as it stands. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mkkuhner (talk • contribs) 22:27, 12 June 2014 (UTC)

Citations added

I have added substantial reference citations to the article. Please check if the 'additional citations' claim should still be here.

Pixarh (talk) 16:18, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Requested move 19 December 2015

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved. Unopposed for over a week. Jenks24 (talk) 05:13, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

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Rabia Basri → Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya – This page has been moved to Rabia Basri a few years ago, which I think was inappropriate. First, standard sources such as Brill's Encyclopedia of Islam 2nd ed and Annemarie Schimmel's Mystical Dimensions of Islam don't mention the form Rabia Basri. Secondly, Rabia Basri is ungrammatical in Arabic (Basri is the masculine form). As far as I can tell, Rabia Basri is the form used in South Asia, which makes it a bad choice for an article about a woman from Basra. Eperoton (talk) 22:18, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Wiki Education assignment: The Middle Ages

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 August 2022 and 9 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): SltHistory (article contribs). Peer reviewers: HammeringHank7, TooColeforyou.

— Assignment last updated by Dwlehm1 (talk) 00:31, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Factual issues in article

I study women in Islam. There are a number of factual issues in this article. It cannot be known from her name whether she is Arab or not. This is a debate.

Faridudin Attar essentially just made things up about Rabia and is not a reliable source. He was writing spiritual stories, not a scholarly endeavor. Rabia could not have known Hasan al-Basri because she was far younger than him. The earliest sources (like al-Sulami) do not have her as an associate to Hasan al-Basra. Margaret Smith made a number of errors because she did not have access to al-Sulami's work on Sufi women or al-Jawzi's Sifat al-Safwa.

Zaynab1418 (talk) 02:42, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: History of the Medieval Middle East in 100 Objects Fall 2022

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 August 2022 and 5 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Anatrev18 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Anatrev18 (talk) 00:20, 11 November 2022 (UTC)

Rabi basri

Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya (Arabic: رابعة العدوية القيسية) (714/717/718 — 801 CE)[1] was an Arab Muslim saint and Sufi mystic.[2] She is known in some parts of the world as Hazrat Rabia Basri, Rabia Al Basri or simply Rabia Basri.[3] 2405:201:C00E:F1F8:A001:16E4:5107:3CE5 (talk) 14:14, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Too much removed, how to put it back in?

Hi Ogress. I do appreciate your very welcome streamlining edits of Dec. 2023, but I believe some of the info you removed was useful, is now missing, an I find that to be a pity. What can be done to put these bits of info back in in a manner acceptable to you? The whole persona is a poetic legend, every substantial part of that legend contributes to its perception and appeal. It's not about a dry theologian of clear historicity, well-documented bibliography and irrelevant life outline.

Other names

• Rabiʼa al-Musmaʼiyya
• Rabiʼa al-ʼAdawiyya
• Rabiʼa al-Qaysiyya

The last 2 we have in "Biography", but the 1st one is nowhere else. What does it mean? Altogether: for a quick overview, the list is very useful, when the user is looking for this aspect only he doesn't need to read through the bio.

She never claimed to have achieved unity with Him; instead, she dedicated her life to getting closer to God.

Good, relevant point for a believer, now gone.

Authors who mention her: the "non-Sufi account by Abu Uthman Al-Jahiz" and Abi Tahir Tayfur of Baghdad are now also gone, and they must be put back in.

said to be the founder of Islamic love mysticism.

Birth & childhood legend

Removed completely, and it's a pity! The same is true about name origin, going into the desert, her prayer, place of death and final age, tomb outside Basra: traditional, not historical, whatever, but so is much of her persona, so it's highly relevant!

She was the fourth daughter of her family and so was called Rabia "the Fourth". According to Attar of Nishapur, whose account is more myth than historical narrative, when Rabia was born, her parents were so poor that there was no oil in the house to light a lamp, nor even a cloth to wrap her with. Her mother asked her husband to borrow some oil from a neighbor, but he had resolved in his life never to ask for anything from anyone except God. He pretended to go to the neighbor's door and returned home empty-handed. At night Muhammad appeared to him in a dream and told him,

Your newly born daughter is a favorite of the Lord, and shall lead many Muslims to the right path. You should approach the Amir of Basra and present him with a letter in which should be written this message: "You offer durood to the Holy Prophet one hundred times every night and four hundred times every Thursday night. However, since you failed to observe the rule last Thursday, as a penalty you must pay the bearer four hundred dinars."

However, after the death of her father, famine overtook Basra. She parted from her sisters and went into the desert to pray and become an ascetic, living a life of semi-seclusion. She is often cited as being the queen of saintly women, and was known for her complete devotion or "pure unconditional love of God". As an exemplar among others devoted to God, she provided a model of mutual love between God and His creation; her example is one in which the loving devotee on earth becomes one with the Beloved.

She prayed:

O Lord, if I worship You because of Fear of Hell,
then burn me in Hell;

If I worship You because I desire Paradise,
then exclude me from Paradise;

But if I worship You for Yourself alone,
then deny me not your Eternal Beauty.

Rabia died in her eighties in Basra in 801 CE (185 AH), where her tomb was shown outside the city.

Is there still a traditional tomb outside Basra? Pilgrimage site? Arminden (talk) 09:50, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

Replies

I removed fantastic narrations because they are not cited to reliable sources and ahistorical. It's not wiki to put unlabeled inaccurate information on a page. If there are important legends about her, they could go in a section but it needs to be cited and clearly marked as not factual. It doesn't matter how poetical something is if someone made it up. Also, these stories show absolutely no factual connection to anything, like the claim that a famine hit Basra after her father's death, or the details of her alleged prayers. Ogress 01:18, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

I strongly dusagree, you are not being factual.

What are the sources?

• Barbara Lois Helms, "Rabi'a as Mystic, Muslim and Woman" - an M.A. thesis at McGill now still cited 5 times!
• Rkia Elaroui Cornell (2019), the fundamental work, cited now 6 times!
• Saadiah Khawar Khan Chishti (1997). Hossein Nasr, Seyyed (ed.). Islamic Spirituality Foundations. Routledge. Kidding me? She might be an Islamic apologist, but got her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in education from Cornell U., is highly regarded in Pakistan - and this is her domain.
• Willis Barnstone; Aliki Barnstone (1992) - highly citable.
• Sri Chinmoy Centre: not RS, but it's only used for "Rabia died in her eighties", period. Easy to replace.
• Smith, Encycl. of Islam - no comment needed.
• Not referenced: byname al-Musmaʼiyya; the two Muslim authors who mention her; "said to be the founder of Islamic love mysticism". Agreed. All this probably based on sources originally indicated and orphaned of them through careless editing. Due dilligence requires going back through the edit history and acting case-to-case; if one doesn't get to a source there: a minimal online research. In any case, not bulk-removal. And these are not the most important among the removed bits anyway.
• Birth & childhood legend: did you completely misunderstand what I wrote? A. It is sourced, but more importantly: B. she's more of a legendary receptacle of beliefs & thoughts than a historical person, for which the accepted lore is what counts, not documented historical facts (famine as typical storytelling trope, but you have issues with historicity, really?!), and we do already have a "Legend & poetry" section.

Either you can find more factual arguments, or I'm afraid the material goes back in. Thanks. Arminden (talk) 09:10, 3 March 2025 (UTC)