Islamic legal reform and revival in the nineteenth century was dominated by the influence of Ibn ʿArabī. Aḥmad ibn Idrīs and Sanūsī in the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt and modern-day Libya, Abū l-Thanāʾ al-Ālūsī in Iraq, ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Jazāʾirī in Syria, Nadhīr Ḥusayn in India and Abū l-Fayḍ al-Kattānī in Morocco were all seemingly independent giants calling for a revival of ijtihād based on a return of focus to the Qurʾān and sunna rather than the fiqh textbooks of the four madhhabs. They were all strongly influenced, to varying degrees of course, by Ibn ʿArabī. Qushāshī and Kūrānī appear to have planted the seeds of this reform in Medina in the seventeenth century with their attachment to the Sufi and theological teachings of Ibn ʿArabī, their willingness to use these teachings to break away from taqlīd and their revivification of ḥadīth study. These teachings were married to a conservative call for ijtihād in jurisprudence by Shāh Walī-Allāh al-Dihlawī in eighteenth-century India and blossomed into a more comprehensive and complete revival of Ibn ʿArabī’s call for a return to the Qurʾān and sunna with the nineteenth-century figures mentioned above. The only major nineteenth-century figure whose calls to ijtihād did not have a direct link to Ibn ʿArabī was Shawkānī, who only at the end of his life renounced his earlier denunciations of Ibn ʿArabī and became a believer in his sanctity.

We have seen how Ibn ʿArabī falls into the category of the Traditionalist movement which also included the majority of early Sufis and the Ẓāhirīs. We have also discussed how Ibn ʿArabī incorporated into his own ‘Akbarī madhhab’ many of the major legal principles adopted by the Textualists (ahl al-ẓāhir) in general, and the Ẓāhirī legal tradition founded by Dāwūd al-Ẓāhirī in particular, but with crucial differences in application and perspective. Furthermore, we have seen how many revivalist movements, such as the Late-Ottoman proto-Salafī reformers of Iraq and Damascus, as well as the Ahl-i Hadith movement in India, started out firmly within the Akbarī tradition before slowly transforming and being absorbed by the modern global Salafī movement. One might ask: are the revivalist trends inspired by Ibn ʿArabī partly responsible for the success of the modern Salafī movement?