Narrative Construction of Sufi Concepts in Mathnawī Literature: Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya as a Paradigmatic Example

Abstract Book of the 12th International Conference on Social Sciences, Humanities and Education

Year: 2026

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Narrative Construction of Sufi Concepts in Mathnawī Literature: Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya as a Paradigmatic Example

Esin Tümer Kurnaz

ABSTRACT:

Modern scholarship on early Sufism has largely approached Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya either as a historical ascetic figure or as a symbolic representative of divine love (maḥabba). However, insufficient attention has been paid to the role of narrative transmission in the formation of core Sufi concepts. Addressing this gap, the present study investigates how narratives attributed to Rābiʿa functioned as epistemic and conceptual instruments within the development of Sufi thought. The study analyzes seventeen Rābiʿa narratives identified in religious, ethical, and Sufi mathnawīs composed in sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkish literature, drawn from twenty-five works by eighteen poets and traced back to early Islamic sources. Employing a method of comparative narrative hermeneutics combined with conceptual history, these accounts are examined alongside foundational texts of classical Sufism. Within this framework, al-Ghazālī’s ethics of action grounded in ikhlāṣ (sincerity) and niyya (intentional intentionality) as articulated in Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn provides the ethical dimension of analysis; Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī’s Mathnawī illuminates the experiential language of love-centered spirituality; and Ibn al-ʿArabī’s metaphysical perspective, particularly in al-Fuṭūḥāt al-Makkiyya, establishes the ontological horizon of tawḥīd and experiential knowledge (maʿrifa). The findings demonstrate that Rābiʿa narratives do not merely reflect an already established mystical doctrine but actively participate in the transition from an ascetic (zuhd-oriented) religiosity toward a theology of disinterested divine love. Through narrative form, concepts such as sincerity in action (ikhlāṣ fī al-ʿamal), non-instrumental devotion, and knowledge of divine reality become socially transmissible and intellectually stabilized. Accordingly, Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya may be understood not simply as a historical saintly figure but as a constitutive agent in the conceptual formation of Sufism through narrative discourse.

Keywords: Conceptual History; Narrative Hermeneutics; Sufism