The Saints We Forgot

In the 10th century, a scholar named Abū ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī sat in Nishapur and did something almost no one else in the Islamic world was doing. He wrote down the names of women. 

His text, Dhikr al-niswa al-mutaʿabbidāt al-ṣūfiyyāt -- the memorial of female Sufi devotees -- recorded 80 women who were not peripheral to the Sufi tradition but constitutive of it.

Among them was Fāṭima of Nishapur. According to classical sources including Aṭṭār's Tadhkirat al-Awliyā and Jāmī's Nafaḥāt al-Uns, she was associated with Dhū'l-Nūn al-Miṣrī and Bāyazīd al-Bisṭāmī, two of the most celebrated masters in Sufi history.

Dhū'l-Nūn is reported to have called her one of his teachers. Bāyazīd spoke of her as a woman of the highest spiritual station.

She was not alone. Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya al-Basrī, born in 8th-century Basra into poverty and enslavement, transformed the theology of the Divine from a transaction into a love affair “mahabba."

She emerged from within the Basran ascetic tradition, she practised within the devotional milieu of her time.

What she did with the raw material was something no one before her had articulated with such force and such finality. Before Rābiʿa, Sufi practice was dominated by khawf and rajāʾ -- fear of hell and hope for paradise. 

The prayer attributed to her across centuries of classical and modern sources says: "O God, if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell. If I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise. But if I worship You for Your own sake, grudge me not Your everlasting beauty."

The concept of maḥabba -- selfless, disinterested love for the Divine -- became the beating heart of every major Sufi order for the next twelve centuries. And Rābiʿa al-Basrī was its architect.

Across South Asia, the tradition deepened. Bengal became a site of extraordinary synthesis where Islamic mysticism met Baul philosophy, Vaishnava devotion, meditative practices producing a spiritual culture that resisted singular ownership.

Lālan Fakir, the 19th-century Baul saint of Kushtia, sang: "People ask, is Lālan a Hindu or a Muslim? Lālan says, I have never known the answer myself."

His philosophy was not secular indifference. It was the Sufi doctrine of fanāʾ -- the annihilation of identity categories as a precondition for encountering the divine “ruhani” world.

This was the Bengal that produced my mother.

The kitchen where theology lives

Most of what I know about God, I learned in a kitchen.

My mother, Mittee, never wrote a book. She never led a congregation. She raised children, ran a household, and somewhere in between, built an entire theology out of wisdom that came to her naturally.

"If your religion makes you behave worse than when you were without it, leave your religion for good. Why should you believe in a higher power if it wants you to be a lower person?" She says this on a Tuesday. Over tea.

I was born into a Sufi spiritual family in Bangladesh. My mother passed onto us the language of unseen before we learned to articulate our names. She sang, she composed, she cried and wrote in her diaries -- "There is no woman, no man in the quest for humanity!

Light has no gender, Time has no gender, God has no gender, Knowledge has no gender, then why should I notice gender, when everything I want to be, wants me to demolish it?"

She says:

"Often people mistake cleanliness for purity. You can wash your hands, your feet, your arms, your toes. .. No doubt washing will make you clean. But does that make you pure? The wudu (ablutions) you do before prayers ...does it clean you or does it purify you?

Water can only wash off the mud; it cannot change who you are. Tell me what purity is. The world has told you so many ways to stay clean, tell me at least one way of becoming pure. Go on dear, tell me your thoughts."

She says, with absolute conviction and a slight smile:

"Everyone wants me to yearn for heaven, But I am told it's the human beings who are the best of creation, why should I chase heaven? If anything, it should chase me! After all, purely as a creation, haven't I outclassed it?"

She teaches the difference between māyā and doyā -- tenderness and pity. "Show māyā, not doyā. Doyā looks down at people. Māyā sits beside them.

When you show doyā, you are saying: I am above you and I have decided to notice your suffering. When you show māyā, you are saying: I am with you and your suffering is mine. The whole distance between hell and heaven lives inside that difference."

And she says something about burial that I have never encountered in any published text but which contains, in a single image, the entire architecture of Sufi metaphysics:

"Soil is where the body is buried. So, if you are made from soil, your body must be buried within yourself. Kill the monsters inside of you, and you will read your own janaza. You will die before your death, and thus you will finally live after your life."

Mūtū qabla an tamūtū. Die before you die. The Prophet's saying, transmitted through a thousand years of male-authored commentary -- and here it is, alive, in a kitchen in Dhaka, spoken by a woman not famous, not networked, not a formal theologian, just a curious lover of God.

My mother’s quotes, adages and her observations -- I started turning them into songs and performing them on stage. They addressed injustice, inequality, religious pretension. For a long time, I assumed this was ordinary. That every Sufi household had a woman at its theological centre -- teaching, transmitting, circumambulating. It is not.

The literature tells a different story. Women in Sufism appear almost exclusively as mureeds -- disciples, devotees. The murshid, the one who transmits knowledge and authority, is nearly always male. 30 years of my spiritual formation under an enlightened woman, not as ornament, not as exception, but as an authority figure is something the archive barely recognises.

This is the ground I write from.

But I did not always understand what I had been given.

When I was 11, I learned that I could not use certain words in school. My friends did not understand when I mentioned the name Gausalazam or the 73 veils of qalb. I was often bullied for the choice of my words and music.

In desperate attempts to keep friendships, I camouflaged my honest self and started acting like them so they would accept me as more of their own. I was suffocating inside, but there was no way out.

Whenever I brought friends home, I frantically followed them from room to room, terrified they might ask the wrong questions or be disrespectful to my family.

I felt trapped in my own making of an artificial persona. It was extremely hard to keep up this facade, and often I would have angry tantrums at home and outside, because I did not know a constructive way to release the energy of living a double life.

What pulled me back was not a dramatic event. It was the slow recognition that the vocabulary I had been hiding -- daam, the breath separating two worlds; sujood, surrendering breath to the soil; jihad against nafs, the war against one's own ego -- was not the thing making me strange. It was the only thing keeping me whole.

My body wanted entertainment and arrogance. My soul wanted fulfillment and humility. The conflict between them was not a phase I was passing through.

It was my identity.

But when I looked into the scholarship to discover more curious travelers like me and more beautifully enlightened women like my mother I noticed what is missing.

Scholars like Annemarie Schimmel documented the breadth of female Sufi participation across the Muslim world in My Soul Is a Woman (1997). Rkia Elaroui Cornell translated al-Sulamī's 10th-century biographical dictionary in Early Sufi Women (1999), recovering those 82 names. 

Margaret Smith's Rābiʿa the Mystic (1928) remains a foundational biography. Jamal Elias and Scott Kugle have contributed important studies on gender and sexuality in Sufi contexts.

Fathurahman (2018) found a near-total absence of scholarship on female Sufi saints in South and Southeast Asia specifically. The 10th-century text exists. The translation exists. And still, the field remains skeletal We know Rābiʿa of Basra and Fāṭima in Nishapur. 

We know almost nothing, academically, about their counterparts in Sylhet, Dhaka, Chittagong, or Kushtia despite centuries of continuous  practice.

Bengal alone synthesised Islamic mysticism with Baul, Vaishnava, and medidative traditions into something that cannot be found anywhere else on earth, and yet the academic literature on female Sufi practitioners in this region barely exists. 

In the surviving literature, women appear overwhelmingly as mureeds -- aspirants, followers -- almost never as murshids -- masters, originators of doctrine. 

Fāṭima of Nishapur is recorded in classical sources as having instructed two of the most celebrated master’s in Sufi history, and yet the structural grammar of Sufi historiography still positions women as receivers, not generators, of spiritual knowledge. 

This is not a gap in the historical record. It is a gap in who was permitted to write it. And even where women are acknowledged, their practice tends to be reduced to peripheral participation -- shrine attendance, domestic devotion, affective piety -- rather than engaged on its own metaphysical terms.

There is no scholarly framework that treats a mother's sermon with the same analytical gravity as a male master's published treatise. These are not accidental omissions. 

They are choices made by centuries of scholars who either decided that women's spiritual authority was not worth recording, or found women’s in positions of spiritual authority complex to decode, and by contemporary academics who have not yet decided it is worth recovering.

The pluralist spiritual heritage of South Asia (Lālan's radical universalism, the syncretic shrine culture, the Baul refusal to be categorized etc) is not disappearing because it was weak.

It is disappearing because it was never fortified with the one thing that outlasts empires and mobs alike: written documentation.

Oral lineages thin with every generation. The grandchildren do not know the words. The granddaughters especially do not know the words, because the women who carried the tradition in their bodies and their kitchens were never asked to dictate, never invited to record, never treated as sources worth preserving.

A song that is not transcribed dies with the singer. A theology that is not written down gets replaced by whatever theology arrives next with better funding and louder speakers.

The research methodology required to address this must honour both the archive and the living voice.

This means Research on the Arts -- theoretical and historical analysis of the existing literature, from al-Sulamī through Cornell, Schimmel, Smith, Elias, and Kugle -- combined with Research in the Arts -- autobiographical, practice-based documentation of living relationships, oral traditions, songs, and the embodied transmission that has always been the primary medium of Sufi knowledge.

The archive is necessary. But the archive alone is not sufficient. Someone must also sit in the kitchen and listen, with a recorder running, before the last kitchen falls silent. This reminds me of another conversation my mother and I were having one evening while making polao roast.

I do not remember about what exactly, only that I was frustrated with the state of things the feeling of being trapped between worlds, between body and soul, between what my body demands and what my spirit knows.

She listened. Then she said:

"Your body wants to chant 'I,' 'me,' and 'myself.' But your soul wants to whisper 'you,' 'we,' and 'them.' That is not a problem. That is the whole journey. The day your soul wins that argument, you will not even notice, because there will be no 'you' left to celebrate the victory."

I asked her once how to be free -- actually free -- from the entrapments that never seem to end. The wallet too small, the body too soft, the passport the wrong colour, the city too crowded, the self too loud.

She said:

"Bury the body within yourself. Die before your death. Then you will finally live after your life. Every cage you think you are inside -- you built it. And the door was never locked. You just forgot to push."

And then she went back to cooking.

Rewarded but not Recorded

I want to end with a verse from the Holy Book that every Muslim speaks multiple times a day, so familiar it almost disappears into the breath:

اهْدِنَا الصِّرَاطَ الْمُسْتَقِيمَ ۝ صِرَاطَ الَّذِينَ أَنْعَمْتَ عَلَيْهِمْ

"Guide us to the straight path -- the path of those upon whom You have bestowed favour." (Al-Fātiḥa, 1:6–7)

When I think of favour that was bestowed, I think of Fāṭima of Nishapur, I think of Rābiʿa al-Basrī, I think of every woman across Bengal and beyond who carried the tradition in her voice and her hands and was never written down.

I think of Mother, cutting leaves in her garden, smiling and sharing her world with me.

Yes, may we follow the footsteps of the ones who were rewarded.

But perhaps the real question is -- how many of those footsteps were women, and we simply never looked down?

Marium Mahzabin is a Research Manager at The Asia Foundation.