Love Without a Leash: The Radical of Rabia al-Adawiyya, Mystic Basra

What would you love if you were not afraid? You have bargained with love your whole life. Given it when it was safe. Withheld it when the cost got too high. Told yourself this was wisdom, or self-protection, or just the way the world works. And deep down - so deep you rarely look - you have wondered what would happen if you stopped bargaining. Rabia al-Adawiyya knew. Born in eighth-century Basra into a poverty so complete she was sold as a child, she became one of the most radical voices in the history of mysticism - not because she suffered, but because of what she did with suffering. She refused to let it make her afraid. She refused to let fear make her love conditional. She stood in a public market holding a torch and a bucket of water and said she intended to burn down paradise and extinguish hell - so that people could finally love God for no reason at all. Love Without a Leash is her story: specific, sensory, and alive. Drawing on centuries of Sufi accounts and the testimony of those who knew her, this narrative reconstructs the texture of Rabia's life - from the night her city swallowed her whole to the long decades of prayer that changed what love could mean. Inside these pages, you will: Discover the difference between love that earns and love that simply gives - and recognize which one you have been practicing Follow a woman who refused every comfort, every proposal, every safe arrangement - and find out what she was protecting Encounter a theology of joy: the radical idea that God does not want your fear, only your presence Feel what it costs and what it frees to love something completely, without guarantee of return >This is a book for anyone who has ever loved something they couldn't justify and kept loving it anyway. The love you have been afraid to give fully - to God, to another person, to life itself - is not weakness. It is the most radical act of freedom possible. Open the first page. The rest will find you.

Pagina's: 302, Paperback, Independently published