It is difficult to know how many Sufis and scholars followed the jurisprudential thought of Ibn ʿArabī when it came to their own private worship, regardless of the school with which they may have officially been affiliated. It was not uncommon throughout Muslim history for scholars to take official positions as judges or muftīs in one school, due to state sponsorship or other reasons, even though their own personal convictions and private worship accorded to another. In the nineteenth century, however, we have a remarkable phenomenon: the jurisprudential thought of Ibn ʿArabī was implemented and followed on a large scale by the different Sufi ṭuruq and scholars that constituted the Idrīsī tradition. It was perhaps the first time that the madhhab of Ibn ʿArabī, as a set of principles of jurisprudence and positive law, came ‘alive’ as a school (beside perhaps the circle of Ibn ʿArabī’s immediate disciples). So far, however, all scholarship has attributed these teachings to the direct ijtihād of the eponymous founder of the Idrīsī tradition, Aḥmad ibn Idrīs (d. 1837), and overlooked the influence of Ibn ʿArabī. This is because Ibn Idrīs was a highly accomplished scholar, a master of Islamic disciplines such as ḥadīth and Qurʾānic exegesis, who proclaimed himself to be a fully independent mujtahid. Ibn Idrīs was also treated as an inspired authority by his students and did not feel the need to cite any previous authorities. Ibn Idrīs’s biographer O’Fahey wrote:

Ibn Idrīs certainly did interpret the Qurʾān and sunna ‘straight’ on his own authority, as O’Fahey put it, and he did it frequently – he had all the intellectual tools and qualifications needed to do so.