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For today’s daily dose of women mystics in medieval Islam, we’ll be looking at marriage, sex, and inter-gender relations between pious Sufi men and women. Let’s see what Hasan al-Basri has to say about his religious sessions with the famous woman mystic Rābi’a al-‘Adawiyya 🧵~mq 
‘I was with Rābi‘a for one full day and night. I was talking about the Path and the Truth in such a way that the thought ‘I am a man’ never crossed my mind, nor did ‘I am a woman’ ever cross hers. In the end when I got up, I considered myself a pauper and her a devotee.’
It is often posited that Sufi women lacked access to all-male religious spaces because of anxieties over interactions between genders. But to what extent is that really true?
Thanks to #TweetHistorians for the chance to talk about some of my work on gender and medieval Islamic mysticism this week! Let’s jump right in with some choice words from a 10th-century woman mystic, who has the following to say about that elusive concept of ‘manliness’ 🧵 ~mq
"Ḥusayn b. Manṣūr Ḥallāj had a beautiful sister who claimed the rank of manhood on the Sufi way. Whenever she came to Baghdad, she covered half her face with a veil and left the other half unveiled. An eminent person saw her and asked, ‘Why don’t you veil your entire face?’
‘First show me a man so that I might veil my entire face,’ she replied. ‘There is only half a man in all Baghdad, and that’s Ḥusayn. If it weren’t for his sake, I wouldn’t even cover this half.’"
- From Najm al-Din Rāzi, Marmūzāt-i Asadī
- From Najm al-Din Rāzi, Marmūzāt-i Asadī
