Rabi'ah al-Adawiyya and The Madman

The other day in class I mentioned a parable in the Bible about a woman who wants to burn down the gates of heaven and hell so that people will do the right thing because they want to, not because they’re told to. I spent some time trying to find this parable, but strangely, it eluded me. Eventually I found it, but not in the Bible: instead, in John Green’s Looking for Alaska.

Needless to say, I’m thoroughly embarrassed. This is one of those times when you think you remember hearing something somewhere but it’s not from an actual credible source, just something you read in a Buzzfeed article, but you tell all your friends anyway because you don’t know the difference.

Here’s the passage from the novel:

But Dr. Hyde was telling a different story, one that I’d skipped. “Karl Marx famously called religion ‘the opiate of the masses.’ Buddhism, particularly as it is popularly practiced, promises improvement through karma. Islam and Christiaity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there’s a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe’a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, ‘I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.’” (Green 174)

I actually was able to find evidence of this story somewhere else, and to me it’s still eerily similar to the tale of the Madman, though if it comes from a Sufi story, there’s much less of a chance of Nietzsche having heard of it than if it had come from the Bible.

Here’s a section from a biography on Rabi'ah al-Adawiyya, the woman saint:

She taught that repentance was a gift from God because no one could repent unless God had already accepted him and given him this gift of repentance. She taught that sinners must fear the punishment they deserved for their sins, but she also offered such sinners far more hope of Paradise than most other ascetics did. For herself, she held to a higher ideal, worshipping God neither from fear of Hell nor from hope of Paradise, for she saw such self-interest as unworthy of God's servants; emotions like fear and hope were like veils -- i.e., hindrances to the vision of God Himself. The story is told that once a number of Sufis saw her hurrying on her way with water in one hand and a burning torch in the other. When they asked her to explain, she said: "I am going to light a fire in Paradise and to pour water on to Hell, so that both veils may vanish altogether from before the pilgrims and their purpose may be sure..." (187-188). (Rabia Stories)

From http://www.rabianarker.com/html/rabia_stories.html.