Rabi’a al-Adawiyya was an 8th-century Iraqi woman who had been enslaved as a child, gained her freedom, and spent the rest of her life in prayer. She is credited with one of the most radical ideas in the history of religion: that God should be loved for God’s own sake alone, not out of fear of hell or hope of paradise.
“O God,” she prayed, in a formulation that has been quoted across traditions ever since, “if I worship You from fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship You for Your own sake, do not withhold from me Your Eternal Beauty.”
This is not a simple thought. It subverts the entire transactional framework of much formal religion. It was thought by a woman, in the 8th century, from a position of social marginality. And it has survived to become one of the foundational statements of Islamic mysticism — Sufism — influencing figures like al-Ghazali, Rumi, and Ibn Arabi.
Why Mysticism and Women
There is a pattern across traditions: women’s relationship to the mystical has often been more direct and less mediated by institutional gatekeeping than their relationship to official religious authority. This is partly circumstance — women excluded from formal theological education found their own routes to religious experience — and partly something more fundamental about what mysticism offers.
Mysticism, in most traditions, involves direct experience of the divine without the intermediary of priest, scholar, or institution. It democratizes the sacred in a way that hierarchical religion does not. And it has historically offered women a form of spiritual authority that the formal structures of their traditions denied them. The mystic who reports direct experience of God is difficult to dismiss on the grounds of gender — though people have tried.
The religious historian Grace Jantzen, in her 1995 book Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, argued that medieval women mystics were more threatening to church authority precisely because their claims to spiritual experience were harder to contain than claims to theological learning. You can prevent a woman from entering seminary; it is harder to prevent her from having visions.
Rabi’a al-Adawiyya (717-801 CE)
Almost everything we know about Rabi’a comes from accounts written well after her death, and these must be read carefully. But the tradition surrounding her is coherent enough to constitute a body of teaching with identifiable characteristics.
She was born into poverty in Basra (in present-day Iraq), orphaned young, and enslaved. The account of her liberation — her master reportedly saw her in radiant prayer in the middle of the night and was so moved that he freed her — is probably legendary in its specifics but true to the pattern of her life: the sacred demanding recognition even in conditions designed to prevent it.
Rabi’a never married, which was unusual for her time. When men proposed to her, she reportedly responded with theological precision: she was too busy with God to have time for a husband. This was not misanthropy — she was known for warmth, for teaching, for drawing followers. It was a statement about priority that her tradition accepted, if uneasily.
Her theology of divine love — mahabba — is sophisticated enough to have been studied by Islamic philosophers for over a millennium. She is credited with establishing the idea that love of God should be pure love, disinterested and unconditional, in a way that parallels the Christian concept of agape and anticipates later Sufi doctrine by centuries. She belongs not on a shelf labeled “women’s religion” but in the central canon of Islamic thought.
Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582)
Teresa of Ávila was born into a converso family in 16th-century Spain — her grandfather had converted from Judaism under pressure — and entered a Carmelite convent at 20. By the time she died at 67, she had reformed an entire religious order, founded 17 convents across Spain, written three major theological works, and been recognized by the Spanish Inquisition as an object of suspicion and, ultimately, a figure beyond its reach.
Her masterwork, The Interior Castle (1577), is one of the most sophisticated maps of contemplative experience ever written. Using the metaphor of a crystal castle with seven concentric “dwelling places” leading to union with God, Teresa describes the inner life of prayer with a precision that is as far as possible from vague religious sentiment. She is precise about what different states feel like, how to tell genuine spiritual experience from delusion or diabolical deception, what the will has to do with contemplative progress. This is a rigorous phenomenology of spiritual experience.
Teresa was doing this while simultaneously managing the practical affairs of founding monasteries — negotiating with local authorities, raising money, managing building projects, handling personnel problems. Her letters, of which over 400 survive, are extraordinary documents: warm, witty, intellectually acute, full of business advice and spiritual direction in equal measure. She is a reminder that contemplation and practicality are not opposites.
She was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970 — one of only four women to have received this designation in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church. The delay is instructive. Her work had been recognized as important for centuries, but the institutional imprimatur took until the year women in many countries were granted the right to open their own bank accounts.
Mirabai (c. 1498-1547)
Mirabai is the poet-saint of the Bhakti movement in 16th-century India, and her story is inseparable from the social conventions she refused. Born into a Rajput royal family in what is now Rajasthan, she was married as a young woman to a prince — and spent her married life in apparent devotion not to her husband but to Krishna, whom she considered her true lord and beloved.
Her husband’s family reportedly found this intolerable. Accounts describe various attempts to kill her: poison, a serpent, a bed of nails. In the stories she survived them all, through divine protection. She eventually left the royal household and spent the rest of her life as a wandering devotee, singing and composing poetry that described her longing for Krishna in the intimate terms of romantic love.
Her poetry — thousands of songs are attributed to her, though scholars believe the authentic corpus is smaller — is still sung across North India and belongs to the living tradition of devotional music. The bhajans (devotional songs) associated with her name are performed daily. She is a saint of Hinduism, but her influence extends across the Vaishnava tradition and beyond.
What made Mirabai transgressive was not her theology but her embodiment of it. She refused the constraints of caste, marriage, and widowhood (her husband died young) in ways that Rajput society found scandalous. She associated freely with lower-caste devotees, including the cobbler-saint Ravidas, whom she claimed as her spiritual teacher — a radical act in a rigid social hierarchy. Her songs address Krishna with a directness and physical intimacy that has struck some commentators as erotic; the Bhakti tradition understands this as the appropriate language for the soul’s relationship with the divine.
Julian of Norwich (c. 1343-c. 1416)
Julian is slightly less well-known outside theological circles than the other figures here, but she belongs in this company. An English anchoress who lived enclosed in a cell attached to a church in Norwich, she received a series of revelations during a near-death illness in 1373 and spent the next 20 years writing and revising her account of them in what became Revelations of Divine Love — the earliest surviving book in English written by a woman.
Her theology is remarkable for its warmth and for a specific theological position that has attracted increasing attention: her use of maternal imagery for God. “As truly as God is our Father,” she wrote, “so truly is God our Mother.” This was not sentimentality — it was a considered theological statement about the nature of divine love, developed with care and grounded in her visionary experience.
Julian’s most famous statement — “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” — is often quoted as a comfort, which it is. But it is also a sophisticated theological position about the ultimate ground of reality, maintained in the face of genuine awareness of suffering and sin. It is a harder thought than it sounds.
What These Lives Have in Common
Rabi’a, Teresa, Mirabai, Julian — they lived in different centuries, different continents, different traditions. What they share is worth noting.
All of them had a direct, personal, experiential relationship with the divine that they refused to subordinate to social expectation or institutional authority. All of them worked outside or at the margins of official religious structures. All of them were transgressive in gender terms — refusing marriage (Rabi’a, Julian), defying family expectations (Mirabai), navigating the Inquisition (Teresa). All of them left bodies of work of extraordinary quality. And all of them were recognized, within their traditions, as genuine spiritual authorities — even when that recognition came slowly and with resistance.
The women’s mystical tradition is not a footnote to the main story of religion. In many respects, it is where the most interesting thinking about the nature of the divine has happened. The male institutional structures kept women from the seminaries and the pulpits; the women found their way to God anyway, and wrote about what they found with a clarity and courage that still commands attention 8 or 14 centuries later.
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