The story of Ibn ʿArabī’s approach to jurisprudence did not end with the Idrīsī tradition. In fact, one of its most fascinating and surprising chapters is its connection with the rise of proto-Salafī thought in late Ottoman Damascus, Iraq and the Ahl-i Hadith movement in India.

The Hijaz Revival

Soon after the passing of Imām Mālik ibn Anas at the close of the eighth century CE and the return of his greatest students to Egypt and elsewhere, the Prophet’s city of Medina lost its place at the heart of Muslim scholarship. It would only regain it an entire millennium later, in the eighteenth century, at a time when the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina appears to have increased significantly in size, and when scholars of all madhhabs began to unite over the study of ḥadīth. At the heart of this revival were a native Medinan Sufi of Palestinian origin, Aḥmad al-Dajānī, better known as Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Qushāshī (d. 1661), and the Egyptian ḥadīth master Muḥammad al-Bābilī (d. 1666), who spent ten years in Medina. Together, they and their students helped create a scholarly network with a focus on ḥadīth study. Today, their names and the names of their students are at the heart of prestigious ḥadīth transmission chains all over the world. Levtzion noted:

Qushāshī has been credited with this ‘merging of the study of taṣawwuf and Ḥadīth in the Ḥaramayn’ that lay at the heart of this movement. Qushāshī’s students described his wondrous ability to ground every Sufi teaching in ḥadīth. He demonstrated this, among other places, in his commentary on the Aphorisms (ḥikam) of Ibn ʿAṭāʾillāh al-Iskandarī, in which he tied each aphorism to a ḥadīth.

Qushāshī was authorised to transmit more than forty different Sufi paths, but he was primarily a shaykh of the Indian Shaṭṭārī Sufi order which traced its teachings to Muḥammad Ghawth (d. 1562).