فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

This article explores Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya’s doctrine of disinterested divine love (al-maḥabba ) as a transformative force in early Islamic spirituality and ethics. Rejecting fear of Hell and hope for Paradise as motives for worship, Rābiʿa articulated a theology that centers on God as the sole end, not a means to reward. Her ascetic practices—voluntary poverty, celibacy, fasting, and refusal of patronage—functioned as embodied critique of patriarchal norms and the political economies of piety in Abbasid society. Through a reception-critical method, the study situates Rābiʿa within a network of early female ascetics and traces her evolution from historical figure to normative icon in Sufi manuals and Persian poetics. Comparative dialogues with Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, and Tolstoy illuminate a transreligious grammar of love as resistance, highlighting inwardness, consent to affliction, and non-domination. Far from privatized mysticism, Rābiʿa’s ethic constitutes a “politics from below,” reclaiming Islam’s ethical heart against instrumentalization by power. Her legacy persists as a program of motive purity that redefines piety as radical love—an enduring challenge to transactional religiosity and a resource for contemporary debates on justice, gender, and spiritual autonomy.