The wild female seeker
As far as I know, perhaps the two women mentioned most lovingly in the Quran are Asiyah (the wife of Pharaoh) and Mary, mother of Christ.
And Allah sets forth, as an example to those who believe the wife of Pharaoh: Behold she said: “O my Lord! Build for me, in nearness to Thee, a home in the Garden, and save me from Pharaoh and his doings, and save me from those that do wrong”;
And Mary the daughter of ‘Imran, who guarded her chastity; and We breathed into (her body) of Our spirit; and she testified to the truth of the words of her Lord and of His Revelations, and was one of the devout (servants). 66:11-12.
Marriage and family are institutions sanctioned by religion and society. But there is something to be said for the wild soul that seeks the Divine alone without the encumbrances of institution. And the Quran acknowledges these. God speaks of these women approvingly.
Asiyah, who rejected her husband’s way, while being crucified by him, turned her face to God and asked for in nearness to Him a home in Paradise (note the emphasis, she asks first indaka (near You) and then bait (home). Paradise is only Paradise when one is near the Friend.
And Mary, characterized by perhaps the greatest scandal a religious woman can experience, pregnancy out of wedlock, has to live her experience in solitude, knowing alone what she knows, while patriarchal society spits upon her character. Sainthood is a private chamber where God alone knows you and no one else truly recognizes you. She is a siddeeqah, God says, a truly devout Friend of the Beloved. She sought passion so single-mindedly that she withdrew from society. She was a saint of miracles. Society was scandalized by her. And yet she followed the Beloved.
Orthodoxy rejects the notion of the wild soul. But we cannot reject Asiyah, Mary, and the saint Rabia. And as for Hagar, we follow her trials after her man left her alone in the desert. We follow in her footsteps, running, seeking, frantic, alone. To the day of Judgment, men and women will run from the sites of Safa to Marwah, rendered sacred by the feet of a slave, a mother. All Muslims performing the obligatory pilgrimage are required to run (the ritual is called sa’ee) between the mounts of Safa and Marwah, as one day centuries ago a sainted woman who in the eyes of the world was but a slave with an infant child (Ishmael), ran between these points.
We follow in the sunnah of a saint, and not rationally, but with love. We trace the steps of a mother running frantic in the desert. Something about that woman’s running is so beloved to God that millions of men and women—yes, Wahhabis who do not visit mazars will also run as Hagar did—will follow her, without questioning why, imitating her actions, crazily, lovingly, as a mother does, without thinking of self.
And then there is the great saint Rabia al-Adawiyya, who never married, and did not feel the need to go into theological exercises about why she did not marry. A slave girl, she left no written works, lived in no monastery, followed no hierarchy, yet is remembered even more today than yesterday, such is the power of her passion.
Many have tried to bury her voice. Many have tried to stifle her sighs. But the wild female seeker lives on, in the pages of the Qur’an, in the sacred rites of Islam, in the words of our saints.
