CHISHOLME HOUSE INTENSIVE COURSE 1975-76

WOMEN

A talk by Layla Shamash

I shall be discussing basically five examples of women, and the following ones have been of particular significance and help for me. In a way none of the past is not present today in its principles and meaning. The forms and context may change but the reality behind these women is a present reality today. Throughout this talk you must bear in mind there is only One Being, so all of what follows is the One Being manifested in this way and that way. In describing only women in this talk I am trying to show the development of woman, which you will hopefully be able to see. I hope you do not think it is just a subjective point of view. In some cases these notions have been confirmed by the writings of others and sometimes by the women themselves.

Eve There are just three aspects of Eve I would like to discuss. The first one is the symbol of Eve being born of Adam. Now whether we believe that this actually took place or not, the fact is that many people for generations and thousands of years believed this, and that has its own weight. So how does this apply to us today? It does not have to be simply a relationship of a woman to a man. It can be a relationship of man to man, woman to woman, man to woman, and so on, and it does not have to be a relationship of husband and wife. It is when you recognise yourself in the other, seeing the other as the origin. That is not seeing the other as the mirror image of you, but recognising yourself in the other, knowing that the other is the origin. There is a difference in this. In a way we are all Eves in relationship to Adam, for as you know, it is said that when God saw the interior of Adam and gave each part being or existence.

Now the next relationship is the relationship of love and knowledge between the first man and woman. Obviously recognising oneself in the other is a process of knowledge and birth, and at the same time it is a process of love, and the highest form of that is the love between a man and a woman. I find that the most beautiful example of the uniting of love and knowledge, because it not only starts from the most basic level but it goes to the highest level. It is knowing yourself and knowing the other in the other, and knowing the other in yourself, and without the knowledge of Him this is not possible. Now for the first man and woman this obviously was the most important thing because we are, all of us, the logical consequence of that.

The third part is Eve seen as the original mother, the mother of all. Now again, this does not have to apply just to women. When the heart is capable of recognising and receiving and accepting all forms, it is the mother of all forms.

Rachel

Rachel is the last of the four women in Judaism. The first one is Sarah, the second one is Rebecca, the third one is Leah, and then Rachel. In Judaism they always talk about the four mothers, and when you pray to God you also ask the three fathers and the four mothers to help you. The three fathers are Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the four mothers are Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel. Rachel, the fourth one, has a particular significance in Judaism. She is the beloved who is situated in the heart, in the position of Beauty in the centre of the Tree of Life. She is also sometimes seen as being right at the bottom of the Tree in Malkut, and in this particular position of hers, she would be described as the Bride in Exile who will eventually have to be reunited. The other position which Rachel is given is the position of the soul, and the fifth position is the Jewish equivalent to Mary.

Now I would like to show how she is linked with Mary. She dies near Bethlehem giving birth to Benjamin, Joseph’s brother. With all the four women, God intervenes in the birth of their male children, in some cases directly. In the case of Sarah, who was married to Abraham, it is said that Abraham and Sarah no longer ‘knew’ each other after the manner of women. In other words they were no longer husband and wife in that way. He was 99 and she was 90, and that is why she laughed when she was told that she was going to have a baby, and the Lord said, ‘How can you laugh? Is there anything too hard for Me?’ And it says that ‘ the Lord visited her and did with her what he promised’ and therefore she conceived. So there is a direct intervention from God for Sarah to conceive. The same thing happens with Rebecca. Rebecca cannot have children and again the Lord intervenes directly, and so on.

Now Sarah received her initiation at the same time as Abraham. They both receive a new name; that is the same name with an extra ‘h’ added on. In those days it was the mother who chose her daughter-in-law, in fact, daughter-in-knowedge-of-God. That choice was mainly based on who was to carry the knowledge of God and the tradition surrounding that knowledge, to succeeding generations. This does not have to be in genealogical order. There seems to be a pattern that is often repeated; the son of a mother with gnosis carries the hidden, or secret knowledge of his mother and his father, but in the next manifestation of a woman with gnosis, that secret or hidden aspect (being the son), appears side by side as a complementary partner. The hidden and manifest are married to bring about another kind of union. I will try and show you how this works. In fact, I was very surprised to find recently that Jung has commented on that same thing. Rachel’s son was called Joseph. Rachel dies in Bethlehem, the place of the ultimate completion of Mary, when she actually gives birth to her son. Mary marries Joseph, a different Joseph of course, but that name is repeating in that way. Now I am going to say something that some of you may not agree with and you will find very strange, but the son of Mary, Jesus, in another manifestation later on as Ali, (I am not saying that Jesus and Ali are the same, but Ali is the nearest equivalent to Jesus in Islam. He is the Saint par excellence), is married to Fatima.

Bilqis

Historically they can find no record of such a woman as Bilqis, the Queen of Sheba. There is no such thing. There is no record of a woman reigning over Yemen. There are records of queens reigning in Khijaz - this is the area around Mecca, but there is no record of queens in Yemen, especially around the time of Solomon. That does not mean that she did not exist, because it seems that there have been several stories linked around Bilqis in that area. Some of the stories come from Ethiopia and they are either in Ethiopian or translated into Arabic, and some of the stories come from Arabic myths of oral tradition, and of course we have the story in the Bible and the story in the Koran. The Ethiopian book is called, in translation, ‘The Book of the Glory of the Kings’, and is in fact later than some of the Arabic stories. It is in the Arabic stories that she is called Bilquis, in other stories she is not called that.

I want to talk about what happened when she went to Solomon. “And when the Queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of his Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions”. The Hebrew word ‘nasa’ means actually ‘to test’, and also ‘to tempt’ and ‘hidot’ means not only ‘hard questions’, but ‘riddles’; that is “she came to test him with riddles”. The riddles themselves are not mentioned in the Biblical text. There it only says ‘and Solomon told her all her questions; there was not anything hid from the King which he told her not.”

So why did she go to Solomon with riddles? The answer seems to lie on several levels, but one of them seems to be obvious, that here was a wise woman who obviously heard of a wise king, and she was willing to benefit, but before she can do that she has to test him. In the legendary stories surrounding Solomon and Bilqis , there is a whole area of magic. So on one level it was like two magicians testing each other. This is one of the riddles; ‘A piper passes over its head and it utters a loud and bitter cry. Its head is like a reed, it is honour for the rich, disgrace for the poor, honour for the dead, disgrace for the living, joy to birds, trouble to fishes.’ The answer is flax, because the wind pipes over the flax stalks, linen furnishes garments of varying value to different classes of men, from flax are made shelters for birds, nets for fishes.

I will read two other riddles because they show the nature of that encounter. ‘Seven there are that issue and nine that enter, two yield the draught and one drinks’. Solomon answers that these are the seven days of ‘nidah’ menstruation, nine are months of pregnancy, two are the breasts that yield the draught and one is the child that drinks it. The second riddle the queen puts to Solomon is this, ‘A woman said to her son, ‘Thy father is my father, and thy grandfather my husband, thou art my son and I am thy sister’ .

Whereupon Solomon answers, ‘The mother who said this to her son is one of Lots daughters’. The third riddle which occurs in almost all the legends is not put into words but into action and consists of the following; the queen sends to Solomon 500 young men dressed like women and an equal number of young women dressed like men. In another version there are 6,000 of each and they are simply dressed the same way. Solomon then has to find out which are the men and which are the women. He solves the riddle by having offered to them, according to the most common version, water to wash themselves, and from the way they do it - the men use only one hand, the women both, - he tells them apart. In another version, he has nuts and roasted ears of corn brought to them. The males, who were not troubled with bashfulness, as the text says, seized them with bare hands, the females took them by putting forth their gloved hands from beneath their garments. In still another version, the boys just spread their garments to receive their gifts while the girls bashfully use their scarves. Now the first of these riddles of the seven and the nine and so on is about the self-enclosed nature of the feminine life. The other one is the birth of the masculine after the father/daughter incest, and the third one is to do with discrimination between masculine and feminine as specific values.

What the whole thing of Bilquis seems to point out is that Bilqis is in a way, a symbol for nature. I would like to go back to the birth of Bilqis. Most of you know that she is half jinn and half human. There are several stories as to why she was half jinn and half human. One story is that the mother, when she was pregnant, saw a goat and she desired it after the fashion of women who are pregnant, and as a result the child was born with one foot like a goat. The goat is very often associated with demons or satanic forces. In another story, in the town where Bilqis lived there was a custom that the eldest daughter had to be sacrificed to the dragon, and Bilqis was taken to a tree and tied down for the dragon to come and eat her. At this time there were seven wise men, and they heard Bilqis cry and saw her tears. She told them the story and they decided to kill the dragon, which they did. As they killed the dragon, a little bit of its blood touched her foot and her foot became animal like. So they all point to some connection with elemental or other forms of life, and they seem to agree that it is of a demonic or jinn character.

Now, when she goes to Solomon, she does not only go because she wants to have more wisdom, but she also wants that other side of her nature to be redeemed, so that that side of her is transformed into the next level. How this happens is very beautiful. You know the story of when she sees the glass floor and thinks it is water and therefore lifts her skirt, well she lifts her skirt and Solomon notices that one of her feet is not right. There is an Arabic version which says that it was not the feet but the legs were hairy. So Solomon says to her, ‘it is all right on men, you are really very beautiful but the hair is a blemish on your legs and at that moment he orders the jinn to come and do a special alchemical thing which removes the hair from her legs, or the foot is healed. That might sound like a very silly little story but the basic thing is that that side of Bilqis, after the asking and answering of the riddles, when Bilqis has already declared her faith and belief in the God of Solomon, is redeemed. In the Bible it says the God of Israel, and in the Koran it says she converted to Islam. It all comes to the same thing, that her spirituality has moved from worshipping the sun to worshipping the one God.

After that the other side of her nature has also to be brought into line with the whole thing, so that side of her has to be redeemed. Now she goes to Solomon as a virgin queen. In a way she goes to him a bit like an Amazon queen. Her vicegerent is also a woman. She has protected herself from men partly because she feared the discovery of her malformed foot, or hairy legs, whichever it was. The virgin queen, here, did not want to give herself to anyone because both that there is purity in this, but also it is a defence. The only man she could give herself up to was Solomon, but this did not happen very easily, because she says to him, ‘I came here as a virgin queen, and I cannot go back other than that, because it would bring shame and suffering onto my people’. So the king says, ‘I will not force you into anything you do not want and I will promise you I will not take you by force, on the condition that you promise me that you do not take anything from my house without my knowledge’. So she laughs because obviously she is very rich; she came and brought him great presents, spices, gold and so on. She was obviously not interested in anything in Solomon’s house, so she says ‘How can you think that I should take anything from your house?’ That night Solomon ordered a very spicy meal to be cooked. In the middle of the night Bilqis was very thirsty and had to drink, so she got up and saw a jug near Solomon’s room and she took the water and drank, at which point Solomon told her that she broke her promise!

Now this union between Bilqis and Solomon is taken by the alchemists as being of significant value because they obviously both had connections with the nature world. Solomon, as you know, could speak to the birds, speak to the beasts, had power over the wind; had enormous power, and over the jinn, of course. And Bilqis’ connection with that side of the world was also strong, so here you have the male and the female archetypes uniting. Here the male principle is much higher. In this way the female principle is able to transform itself to a higher level. Now the result of that union was a son, and that son is said to be the actual child who brought the Ethiopian dynasty into being. In fact it is said that the Magi are descendants of that child. After that child is born, she says something like this to Solomon: ‘Henceforward a man who is of thy seed shall reign, and a woman shall never more reign. Only seed of thine shall reign, and his seed after him, from generation to generation.’ For there was a law in the country of the Ethiopians that only a woman should reign, and that she should be a virgin who had never known man. In this whole thing she abandons her position of power to a position of spirituality. So it is the beginning of the patriarchal system. There are aspects of Bilqis further back; the whole thing of demons, and demonic foot, and all that part of Bilqis, has similarities with some stories to do with Lilith - Lilith being the first wife of Adam who had a demonic side to her nature, a jinn side to her nature.

Now you remember in the first talk, when we talked about Eve, the name Esher means the fiery one, the one who is born of fire; and the jinn are of the element of fire, so you get a feeling that there is some connection with that which had to be transformed in generation after generation afterwards into a higher state of being, for before she was called Eve, woman was called Esher. And in one of the translations of the name of Bilqis, she means the fiery one; again her connection with the fiery element. So she has a connection with Lilith, and her symbol of the virgin queen gives her a connection with Sophia. Now the connection with Sophia comes specifically in the Christian text and the alchemical works. If you remember from the second talk, she is described sometimes as queen of the South, and is associated with the wind of the South. But the south wind is, as Jung mentions, in psychology and alchemy, a symbol of the Holy Ghost, presumably on account of its hot and dry quality. The Holy Ghost is fiery and causes exhalation. ‘From this context it becomes clear that the regina austri is a feminine example.’ Now in the Kabbala the Queen of Sheba is exclusively identified with Lilith. For her Sophia aspect we have to look to the Shekinah. This is the feminine inhabitation of God in man. So the Queen of Sheba is, as it were, the dark sister of the Shekinah, her shadow. ‘This discrimination indicates a split, but at the same time a differentiation, for there are very interesting relations between them and the Zohar.’ Before I stop about Bilqis, I would like to say that she seems to also have a connection with the notion of the dark virgin, or the black virgin, as she is sometimes described, and I think that she is in fact a prefiguration of Mary.

Before I go on to talk about Mary, just to recap a point that does not seem to have been clear. Adam had a wife before Eve, according to the Zohar and the Madras and the commentaries on the Bible and so on, and she was called Lilith. She was created like Adam was created, from the same elements at the same time, and they had equal stations. But because Lilith refused to obey Adam, she was made to run away, and because she ran away, God sent some angels after her to bring her back, and she refused to come back, and since then she has been cursed in such a way that she has almost become demon like, or genie-like, and her children are half jinn and half human. So what we have here is the first earliest symbol of the ‘devouring mother’ in fact. (Of course, jinn is not necessarily translated as ‘demon’, for there are good and bad jinn, and ‘demon’ may have the wrong connotation.) In fact the ‘devouring mother’ aspect has to be redeemed. In certain Greek myths, the devouring mother figure asks certain questions, and if you cannot answer, she will devour you - the sphinx type. And then there is the situation with Ishtar who wanted a lover, and if the lover did not obey her command she would start raging around in the skies - there is that aspect of the mother that over and over again has to be met with and dealt with. It seems that that aspect of the Great Mother in a strange way is the aspect that spurs mankind to higher and higher achievements, because quite often the hero of these tales has to surmount all sorts of problems in order to defeat that sphinx or this aspect of nature. It is the devouring aspect of nature in fact, the inhuman side of nature. So if you understand it, it is not so frightening or mystifying as it sounds. After Lilith ran away, God decided He would create a woman out of Adam so that situation can never happen again, that the woman just runs off because she will not obey Adam.

Mary

So much is written about Mary and her different aspects, but she remains as the most important symbol of womanhood. The aspects she is associated with are many. Sometimes she is associated with the earth, purity, receptivity, humility and so on. Above all she represents the aspect of the mother. The aspect I would like to mention here is in her role of initiating, when she appears to various people. Today we discussed how one should not pray to anyone but God, but sometimes the answer, the reply, comes in the form of Mary appearing in dreams or visions. Now you know that Satan cannot take the form of the Prophet or Mary, especially if it is a dream, because there one is almost sure that the ego is not involved in this. Mary being also the archetype of the mother, appears equally to men and women. Both must have a mother connection. But she can symbolise the purity of the heart, or receptivity as well.

For the woman there is a further dimension added to the metaphysical dimension. It is the dimension of the mother being identified with, actually and physically. For a woman it can mean an initiation into the cognition and completion of the mother aspect. So even though she might appear in the same form to two people, for the woman it will have a slightly different dimension. A man can say that his heart has become pure, has become receptive, and therefore Mary appearing to him is a symbol of that, but for the woman it has an added dimension.

I would like to talk now about Mary and Jesus, and Adam and Eve. According to Ibn ‘Arabi, these are the four major archetypes. He says that, in the same way that Eve was born of Adam without a mother, Jesus was born of Mary without a father. So you have Adam and Mary and Eve and Jesus in that connection. So with these four, according to Ibn ‘Arabi, the whole thing is completed. You have father, son, mother, daughter elements appearing with the arrival of Mary and Jesus. You can take it on another level, which I find is also quite interesting. If humanity for thousands of years wants to carry on thinking that the original mother and original father have sinned sexually, and therefore we are all the children of sin then something has to happen in order to bring out a situation where a child is born without any sin. So there is a woman who actually gives birth without sinning at all, as another aspect of Eve, only valid for Christians. Now in the next manifestation, of Fatima, the mother and daughter of her father, the principle of the mother and the daughter is manifested in one person. The Prophet says about his daughter, who has many titles, but one of her titles is, ‘the mother and the daughter of her father’. Of course we can equally say that the Prophet is the father and the son of his daughter, but he was talking about his daughter when he was giving that description, he was not describing himself.

Now it is said that when the prophet was born there were four women present at his birth. Again you find this thing of the four women; the four women of Judaism; the four women present at the Prophets birth; Ibn ‘Arabi talks about four women reaching kamal, and so on. It always comes in fours, and this is an aspect, again, that symbolises nature. So there were four women present at the Prophets birth. One was his own mother, one was Mary, one was Asya, the ‘mother’ of Moses, and then the fourth one was his daughter. Now the question to ask is: In what aspect was Fatima present? Why was she present at the birth of her father? For a woman to understand what this really means is a further initiation. Not only was she present when he was born, but she was also present when he actually became a prophet. You must also understand this on the level of principles as well as all other levels, bearing in mind the four principles as well as the position of Muhammed as the complete and perfect Man, and his Reality. The complete and full and certain knowledge of this is an initiation for woman as the mother of her father, or for a man to be the father and son of his daughter.

Now with regard to Fatima being the daughter of the Prophet; she had another title which was the ‘virgin mother’, even though she actually had a husband and she had many children. There is a story which I would like to tell about how that similarity was perceived. There was a time when the Christians, at the time of Muhammed, were very unhappy with the situation of Islam appearing among them, and they wanted to test the Prophet. In fact they wanted to have a war, and they decided that instead of having a war they would have two sides and have a confrontation of words. They would say, ‘He who is not speaking the truth, may he be struck dead’. The Christians came on one side and the Prophet came on the other side with Fatima, Ali and the two sons, Hasan and Hussein. As soon as the Christians saw the Prophet and Fatima appearing towards them, they said: ‘Stop, we are convinced, we do not want to have any confrontation anymore, we do not want to have a war.’ For they had recognised in Fatima something that was very similar to Mary. In fact she is Mary in another manifestation and the Christians did not see Fatima, they saw Mary standing next to the Prophet, and that was what frightened them.

The situation of Fatima is both unique and universal, because she is the daughter of a prophet, the mother of saints, and the wife of a saint, of a Khalifah, and in fact of the saint, as far as Islam is concerned. There is a story concerning Fatima, the Prophet, the son-in-law Ali and their children, and they are called ‘the people of the cloak’, in the sense that the cloak of the Prophet covered all five of them, including the Prophet, and through this there was a special transmission made at this time because they were covered by one cloak at one time.

The title of Fatima is Fatima Zahrah. Zahrah in Arabic has two aspects, one of which means the rose or the rosy one, and the other one is an association in fact with Venus. Venus is called Zuhrah, and both aspects are to do with beauty. So there is the beauty aspect of Fatima that comes about. The beauty of Fatima is like the beauty of pure water but with such depths that we are yet to discover. Recently I have been told by a very wise man from Iraq that another title of Fatima is ‘The mother of the Secrets’, or the ‘Carrier of the Secrets’. This again comes back to the hidden aspect of the feminine nature. Now you will know that at the beginning of the century, Mary appears to a whole lot of children in a place called Fatima in Portugal, and that was not just a coincidence. It is the same reality manifesting twice, or manifesting in a different way at that time.

Rabbia al Adowiya

She was called Rabbia because she was the fourth daughter in a very poor family and, as you know, daughters in poor families is not a very good thing, so her father was very upset when he heard of her birth and that night he had a dream. The Prophet appeared to him in the dream and said, ‘Don’t worry, this daughter of yours is going to be worth thousands of men of my nation. So tomorrow you must go to the Emir of the town and tell him of this dream and ask him to pay you enough money so that you can look after your family.’ Which he did.

Now unfortunately, a few years later, the family came again to a great disaster. The mother and father were killed and the children were taken as slaves. Rabbia found herself in the position of a slave. One day her master heard her singing and praying in her room. He was able to see through the crack of the door that, although there was no light source in the room, there was a great, unearthly light, above her head. He immediately recognised that he did not have an ordinary woman in his house, so he said to her ‘You can remain here as the mistress of the house if you want, or you are free.’ She said, ‘I want my freedom’ and she left. Now the amazing thing about Rabbia is that she does not belong to any set of tradition in a sense. She did not have a teacher, or a master, she was not with a terika, she was not born of a prophet, neither did she give birth to a prophet, nor was married to one. She is not associated with any other great saint in that sort of way. She is a singular woman. She is often described as the woman who lost herself in union with the divine, or the one who is accepted by men as the second spotless Mary. This is according to some of the biographers of Rabbia.

There are many stories and prayers of hers. If you are interested and want to find out more. Attar was one of the people who tried to gather up her stories because he was very influenced by Rabbia. She used to say things like, ‘I have given Him (You?) my hand. Take my hand completely,’ - this is one of her poems - ‘Take my hands completely, I do not have any responsibility for myself or anything else. You are responsible for me, so take my hands.’

She lived in Bathra, in the place of Ali and the children of Ali, and she was buried in Jerusalem. She is buried exactly next to the cave of Jesus and Mary, where they used to go and hide and pray, on the Mount of Olives underneath the mosque of Ascension. Ibn ‘Arabi refers to Rabbia in the Futuhat al Makiyah in the category of the saints who have been given special knowledge of secrets. For example, when he says ‘Abu Yazid al-Bistami and Rabbia al-Adowiya, and one other.’ She was without parents, without children, without a husband, without a tarika or a sheikh. She received her spiritual teaching, or her knowledge, directly. She embodies the aspect of love in the most concentrated, most pure, and earliest form in Islam. She was one of the earliest saints in Islam in whom this aspect of love was very, very manifest. Now you might say, ‘with so much love, why did she not marry?’ I have been puzzling over this for a long time, and the answers she gave to the men who asked for her hand, one of them was Hassan Busri who was very respected at the time, he asked for her hand in marriage and she said, ‘Why ask me for my hand, why don’t you ask Allah for marriage? I don’t belong to myself, I belong to Him’. In a way she was saying firstly, ‘I don’t belong to myself, I belong to Him, so there is no use in me marrying anyone else’ and in another way she is saying ‘Why don’t you find your union with God?’ The more I think about it the more I think there are two sides to this question. One is that she had to remain single in that sense, not associated with another in that way, as a husband or father or son, to show that it is possible for women to reach that sort of completion even though they do not marry. They have to be of a special kind. The other thing is, I think there actually was not a man at that time in her locality who was equal to her spirituality. So there was not someone who was fit to marry her, so she did not marry.

But she was completely lost in the union of love. She describes herself as the Bride. These are some stories about her:

One day she was seen carrying fire in one hand and water in the other and she was running with speed. They asked her what was the meaning of her action and where was she going? She replied, ‘I am going to light a fire in paradise and pour water onto hell, so that both veils, hindrances to the true vision of God, may completely disappear from the pilgrims and their purpose may be sure, and the servants of God may see Him without any object of hope or motive of fear. What if the hope of paradise and the fear of hell did not exist? Not one could worship his Lord or obey Him. The best thing for the servant who desires to be near his Lord is to possess nothing in this world or the next, save Him. I have not served God from fear of hell, for I should be like the wretched hanged if I did it from fear, nor from the love of paradise, for I should be a bad servant if I served for the sake of what was given, but I have served Him only for the love of Him, and out of desire for Him.’

I should like to give a quick translation of one of her poems where she says ‘I love you with two kinds of love, the love which is to you and the love which is of you because you are the source of that love. I yearn two kinds of yearning, the yearning which is of feeling separate from the Beloved, and the yearning when the feet are so near your door.’ And in both cases, she says, ‘The honour is not for me in this or that, but it is all for you. Because you are the source of all this’, i.e. yearning and love. The next part of her poem is to do with Zikr. The aspect of her that inclines towards the transcendent side is very evident. Though she says, ‘My body is here and I have to share it with guests and we have to talk and so on’. But she was completely beyond the physical, material interaction of the world. Her servant once said, ‘Why don’t you come out and contemplate the manifestation, the creation of God?’ She said, ‘Why don’t you go in and contemplate the Creator?’ That is a typical answer of hers.

Because of the love of the Station of Love and the knowledge that Ibn ‘Arabi talks about her having, she is in a way in a line where she can combine the aspects of love and knowledge in one being and makes her not just a symbol of sainthood in Islam, but something which is beyond just the confines of Islamic tradition. In fact, I was so surprised recently that she has been described and quoted by all sorts of other people talking about women in completely different contexts. To give an example, they came to her and said, ‘Rabbia, do you love the Prophet?’ She says, ‘Well, love of the Prophet and hate of Satan have not been left much room by love of Him’. But later on she said in reply to their question of why she prayed so much, ‘When the day of resurrection comes, the Prophet can be proud and say - this woman is of my nation. ‘ She made it a habit to go to Mecca at certain times, but I would just like to show that the flavour of her spirituality was beyond the confines of Islamic tradition and that, in fact, her religion was the religion of Love.