If I worship God from fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; if I worship from hope of Paradise, exclude me; but if I worship God for God's own sake, do not withhold Your everlasting beauty
This prayer draws a sharp line between worship motivated by reward or punishment and worship that wants nothing at all beyond God, treating only the second as genuine.
Preserved in Attar's Tadhkirat al-Awliya, Rabia al-Basri's prayer names the two conventional motives for religious devotion, fear of Hell and hope of Paradise, and asks God to strip both away from her, so that whatever worship remains can be verified as untainted by self-interest. The structure is deliberately conditional: if her devotion turns out to be transactional, offered in exchange for avoiding punishment or securing reward, she asks to be denied the very outcomes she'd have been angling for, since devotion bought with an incentive isn't the thing she is claiming to offer. Only the final clause states what she actually wants, to worship God for God's own sake, with the everlasting beauty of the Divine as its own and only sufficient object. This prayer is generally treated as the clearest early formulation within Sufism of disinterested love as distinct from the fear-and-hope-based piety that dominated much earlier religious practice.
If I worship God from fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; if I worship from hope of Paradise, exclude me; but if I worship God for God's own sake, do not withhold Your everlasting beauty.
Tadhkirat al-Awliya
Written about in
- What Sufism says about love
Rabia asks God to take away both of her reasons for worshipping, fear of punishment and hope of reward, so that whatever is left can be trusted. The prayer is built as a set of conditions on purpose.
- What Sufism says about wanting to be admired
Rabia's prayer is built as a test with conditions. If her devotion turns out to be bought with fear of punishment, she asks to be punished anyway; if bought with hope of reward, to be excluded from it. Only what survives both clauses counts as the thing she claims to be offering.