The previous chapter examined Ibn ʿArabī’s Traditionalism and its relationship to his Sufism. We will now look in detail at Ibn ʿArabī’s approach to jurisprudence to see where he could be situated within the broad Traditionalist school of thought, but more importantly to arrive at a clear picture of his legal method and interpretive framework. Ibn ʿArabī, like every author of uṣūl al-fiqh works, made his own choices in terms of legal principles, which meant that he effectively created his own madhhab or school of law. Most authors of uṣūl works, however, could still be classified as followers of one of the five main Sunni schools – the Ḥanafī, Mālikī, Shāfiʿī, Ḥanbalī or Ẓāhirī schools – because they usually agreed with and defended the major legal principles upheld by one of those schools and may have differed from them only on minor matters. As Suyūṭī would later explain, many of these scholars could be classified (and indeed viewed themselves) as fully independent mujtahids who were still ascribed to one of the main schools by virtue of the fact that they generally agreed with the major principles of that school; this is called a mujtahid muṭlaq muntasib (fully independent and capable mujtahid with an affiliation to one of the schools).

As for Ibn ʿArabī, he should be classified as fully independent mujtahid with his unique set of major jurisprudential principles, much like his predecessors Ibn Ḥanbal, Bukhārī and other Traditionist-Jurisprudents. His own principles brought him very close to the Ẓāhirīs, again much like Bukhārī before him, but were not identical to those of that school. Due to the superficial similarity between his school and that of the Ẓāhirīs, Ibn ʿArabī was frequently confused for a Ẓāhirī, both in his own lifetime and today. A major factor behind this confusion is the general lack of awareness of the existence of the specific school of Traditionist-Jurisprudents which flourished for a short while and then for the most part died out and whose figures were falsely appropriated by the later madhhabs. There was consequently a lack of awareness of the history of the Traditionist-Jurisprudent approach in al-Andalus, especially among the Sufis.