Doorkeeper of the Heart
Rabi'a, translated by Charles Upton

Rabi'a Al-'Adawiyya, a major saint of Islam and one of the central figures of Sufi tradition, was born around 717 AD in Basra in what is now Iraq. Little is known of her actual life: she was born into a poor family and both her parents died in a famine. Separated from her sisters, homeless and destitute, she was sold into slavery but was eventually freed. In later life she became famous as a saint; she was offered money, houses, proposals of marriage, but she preferred to remain single and live in humble surroundings...

To place Rabi'a in perspective we might compare her to another great Sufi figure and one of the greatest spiritual writers of all time — Rumi. First, she stands some 500 years earlier, close to the beginnings of Sufi poetry as we know it. If Rumi is the Ocean, Rabi'a is the Well. If Rumi has sheer ecstatic energy and compacted multidimensional meanings, Rabi-a has virgin clarity and undistracted focus; along with the taste of wine, she carries the taste of water ― a precious substance when you live, as Rabi'a did, in the desert of God. (from the back cover)