3 - Of Loves Both Spoken and Silent: Rābi‘a al-‘Adawiyya and the Wooing Group

Summary

I would like to begin this essay by sharing an encounter I had with Catherine Innes-Parker in 2019. With her characteristic generosity, she had made time to see me during her sabbatical in Oxford (UK), and, again characteristically, she insisted on using her time to discuss my work rather than her own. As we talked, I showed her a quotation from an Arabic poem attributed to a Proto-Sufi woman who lived in the eighth century:

Wherever I am, I witness His beauty.

He is my prayer-niche and my prayer-direction.

When Catherine read this quotation, she remarked: ‘that's like saying, “He's my anchorhold”!’ For me, this comment has become an encapsulation of the many ways in which I was impacted by Catherine's scholarship and by her humanity. That parallel she instantly made, so effortlessly and with such open-heartedness, made me read these texts in entirely new ways. Her words also gave me so much more confidence in taking a comparative approach to Christian and Islamic medieval women's writing – a task that I had, until that moment, felt very doubtful about attempting. I did not know, then, that this would be one of the last times I would ever speak with Catherine.

There are so many ways in which Catherine Innes-Parker's scholarship gave voice to silence. This included her pioneering work on the meditations known collectively as the Wooing Group, research that spanned many decades and that was crowned in her ground-breaking edition of these five texts in 2015. The work of Innes-Parker and her fellow feminist scholars on anchoritism – Cate Gunn, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Elizabeth Robertson, Diane Watt and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, among others – inspired me to search for the agency of devotional and contemplative women in texts outside of Europe. I was motivated by these scholars to listen to the ways in which Arabic Islamic texts may speak with their English Christian counterparts. In this essay, I seek to situate three of the Wooing Group meditations (Ureisun of God, Wohunge of ure Lauerde, and Lofsong of ure Louerde) in a global context, particularly through a comparative reading of these texts with poems attributed to Rābi‘a Al-‘Adawiyya (d. c. 801), an influential ascetic and contemplative in Basra in the Arab lands.