l-fire, and if I
keep patient it is only because I hope to enter Paradise. Now that man
alone deserves to be taken into account who, without self-regarding
motives practises patience for the sake of the Most High, and whose
renouncement of the world has not Paradise for its object, but only the
desire to please God. Such a way of acting is a manifest sign of
sincerity of heart."

Asked on another occasion what his spiritual state was like, Hasan
replied, "My state is like that of a man shipwrecked in the sea, who is
clinging to a solitary plank."

He never laughed. At the moment of death he smiled once, and called out
"What sin? What sin?" Someone saw him after his death in a dream, and
asked him, "O Hasan Basri, thou who never wert in the habit of smiling,
why, when dying, didst thou say with a smile, 'What sin? What sin?'"
Hasan answered, "When I was dying I heard a voice which said, 'O Azrael,
hold back his soul a little longer, it has still one sin,' and in my joy
I exclaimed, 'What sin?'"

The night of his death another of his friends had a dream, in which he
saw the gates of heaven open and heard a voice proclaim, "Hasan Basri
has come to his Lord, Who is satisfied with him."

[8] These and the following eight sketches are taken from Attar's
"Tazkirat-ul-Auliya."

CHAPTER III

RABIA, THE WOMAN SUFI

Rabia, the daughter of Ismail, a woman celebrated for her holy life, and
a native of Basra, belonged to the tribe of Adi. Al Qushairi says in his
treatise on Sufism, "She used to say when holding converse with God,
'Consume with fire O God, a presumptuous heart which loveth Thee.' On
one of these occasions a voice spoke to her and said, 'That we shall not
do. Think not of us an ill thought.' Often in the silence of the night
she would go on the roof of her house and say, 'The lover is now with
his beloved, but I rejoice in being alone with Thee.'"

When Rabia grew up her father and mother died. At that time there was a
famine in Basra. She came into the possession of an evil man, who sold
her as a slave. The master who bought her treated her hardly, and
exacted all kinds of menial services from her. One day, when she was
seeking to avoid the rude gaze of a stranger, she slipped on the path
and fell, breaking her wrist. Lying there with her face to the ground,
she said "Lord, I am far from my own, a captive and an orphan, and my
wrist has just been broken, and yet none of these things grieve me.