In the mid-eleventh century, a rumour circulated in Baghdad about a Sufi of ʿAlid descent living in a nearby province. The progeny of the fourth Shiʿi imam, Zayn al-ʿAbidin, this shaykh had thousands of followers and, according to the rumour, harboured ambitions for the caliphate. Abbasid caliph al-Qaʾim bi-Amrillah (r. 1031–1075) summoned the shaykh, Abu’l-Wafaʾ (Ot. Ebü’l-Vefaʾ), to Baghdad for interrogation by forty leading religious scholars who examined him on the meaning of Islam. During the interrogation, the opening of which is partially reproduced in the epigraph above, Abu’l-Wafaʾ appeared confident as he proceeded to respond to the questions in his accented Arabic. Sitting on a burning hot, iron platform, the shaykh delivered a long and spirited speech contrasting his own esoteric understanding of religion with that of the exoteric jurists who, he contended, were incapable of penetrating the surface of Islam to reach its actual essence. His answers were so elegant that he put to shame the ulema in attendance, who had been quick to dismiss him as ignorant because, having grown up among the Kurds, he spoke broken Arabic. At the end of this trial and several others, all of which he passed with equal success, the caliph was finally convinced of Abu’l-Wafaʾ's true sanctity and detachment from worldly ambitions, and granted him the income of villages in the vicinity of his dervish convent (Ar. zāwiya; Ot. zāviye), located in the Qusan district of central Iraq, an offer that Abu’l-Wafaʾ would, however, decline.

To those members of the present-day Alevi community in Turkey who have some basic acquaintance with Alevi oral traditions, this story of a falsely charged ʿAlid sayyid from the provinces would sound strikingly familiar despite its temporal and spatial distance. Generations of Alevis in Anatolia have recounted similar stories in which cultic figures of the Alevi pantheon endure a series of trials and physical ordeals through which they prove their superior spirituality and deeper understanding of religion to a suspicious ruler, a probing religious rival or a potential convert.