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Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture,

Theory
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RABIA BASRA: A MUSLIM MYSTIC SEEN

THROUGH THE SIKH EXPERIENCE OF
SAKHI
a
Jagdish Singh
a
377 MCA25 Basant Nagar, Maditha Road, Amritsar, Punjab
Version of record first published: 18 Jun 2009.

To cite this article: Jagdish Singh (2009): RABIA BASRA: A MUSLIM MYSTIC SEEN THROUGH THE SIKH
EXPERIENCE OF SAKHI , Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 5:1, 53-66

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17448720902935052

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 Sikh Formations, Vol. 5, No. 1, June 2009, pp. 53–66

Jagdish Singh

RABIA BASRA: A MUSLIM MYSTIC

SEEN THROUGH THE SIKH
EXPERIENCE OF SAKHI
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This essay attempts a creative representation of the life of an eighth-century Muslim

female saint, Rabia Basra. Rabia’s life and experiences were so extraordinarily unique
and diverse that no single genre or writing style can do justice to these vivid experiences.
As a result this essay is a biographical introduction to Rabia’s life, and at the same time
tries to articulate something about her spirituality. The author, Jagdish Singh, belongs to
a new generation of Punjabi Sikh writers grounded in Punjabi, Persian, Braj literatures,
but at the same time able to critically engage with the ideas from the world’s major
religious traditions and with contemporary Western philosophy.
While this particular article is composed primarily in prose, its form combines a
certain poetical flavor in order to capture the beauty of certain scenes from Rabia’s
life and to describe her inner state of ecstasy. This piece tries to comprehend spiritual
yearning and human suffering within an integral vision. Instances from Rabia’s life illus-
trate this relationship of suffering and spirituality in an extremely beautiful and original
fashion. On the one hand, suffering opens the doors leading to spiritual fulfillment and
provides the necessary push throughout the journey. On the other hand, on a collective
level, every suffering is seen as an external manifestation of man’s spiritual degradation.
The central theme of this essay is presented through an instance of her life, whereby
intellect confronts saintliness and the former becomes transformed by the latter. Hasan
Basri, a famous Islamic theologian, was a contemporary of Rabia. On one occasion while
Basri was delivering a sermon, he caught sight of Rabia sitting in the audience. At the
sight of her beauty he became impatient to win her as his wife. In due course Basri gath-
ered the holy men of the city and through them pressured her to enter into marriage.
Rabia, however, insisted that she was already married. This reply only confused the men
since they had known her from her childhood and knew that she had never married. But
Rabia was hinting at her spiritual union with the divine. When Hasan Basri lost his
patience and rudely judged upon her womanhood, she said something which entirely
transformed Hasan’s life and gave his spirituality a new direction.
In this encounter between saintliness and intellect, Jagdish Singh attempts to present
saintliness as being different from both passion and intellect, yet not as hostile to either.
Saintliness, although almost impossible to theorize, is that state when someone’s actions
start to originate not from her rational intellect but from faculty governed by aesthetic
ISSN 1744-8727 (print)/ISSN 1744-8735 (online)/09/010053-14
# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17448720902935052
 54 SIKH FORMATIONS

concerns. No theorization can capture its essence, only particular instances from the
lives of saints can tell us how it tastes. A peculiarity of this state is that though spiritual
union liberates the soul, yet the soul, after achieving this union, willfully comes into a
discipline known as Shariah in Islam and Maryada in Sikhi. Most often, this discipline is
criticized as being authoritative and curtailing human freedom. But it becomes lifeless
dead weight only when it gets divorced from spiritual experience. When seen in the
right balance, this discipline is what sustains life and makes it beautiful.
But what motivated the author to write about the mystical experience of an eighth-
century Muslim saint? Jagdish Singh argues that Sikhs have a unique experience of Sakhi
(testimony), an event where transcendence and immanence combine to create an experi-
ence which ends the sense of otherness. The experience of saints, which stands apart from
both intellectual realm and creative imagination, creates Sakhi. The twentieth-century
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writer/poet Puran Singh has presented different Sakhis in his work with a sense of
harmony while preserving their difference at the same time. This essay suggests that
even the subtlest readings and interpretations of history are incapable of capturing the
experience of a saint because the origins of such experiences do not necessarily stem
from psychological or socio-political conflicts. This experience, which is present in
every religious tradition, has as its origin an unknown realm which escapes theorization.
The Sikh experience has the uniqueness of being capable of identifying such experiences
in various different traditions and responding to them in a spiritual balance.
– Editor
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Jagdish Singh. Address: 377 MCA25 Basant Nagar, Maditha Road, Amritsar (Punjab).
[email: jagdishsingh.asr@gmail.com]
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