The Reception of Ibn ʿArabī in Hadhrami Sufism Revisited

While recent decades have shown a steady academic interest in the Bā ʿAlawī sāda and their large diasporic communities across the Indian Ocean region, the premodern origins of their Sufi tradition in Hadhramaut remains poorly understood, with lingering concerns surrounding the reliability of available primary sources on their formative history in the valley. By closely re-examining the available primary sources from the 15th and 16th centuries (historical chronicles; biographical literature; Sufi intellectual works), this paper argues against the predominant academic narrative that far from reflecting a provincialist phenomenon, as the product of an intellectual and cultural backwater, the Bā ʿAlawī scholarly tradition, and Hadhrami Sufism more broadly, remained historically well-integrated within the wider intellectual and spiritual currents of western Yemen and the Hejaz, exhibiting a sophisticated intellectual engagement with the wider legacy of philosophical Sufism, including the thought and doctrine of its foremost classical authority, Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī.