Rabia al-Adawiyya

A freed slave of Basra, and the one who turned Sufism from fear to love. Her prayer is the tradition's cornerstone: "O God, if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; if I worship You in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship You for Your own sake, do not withhold from me Your eternal beauty." She walked the streets with a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other — to burn down Paradise and douse the fires of Hell, so that no one would ever again love God for a reason. The Kabbalah's word for this is lishmah — Torah for its own sake — and the Hasidim tell the same stories of it.