The Journey of ʾIbn ʿĀbid al-Fāsī (d. 1048/1638): A Study of Ṣūfī Elements, Riḥla Legacy, and Narrative

This thesis consists of literary case study of a classical Arabic travel narrative dictated by the Moroccan scholar and Ṣūfī Yūsuf ʾibn ʿĀbid al-Fāsī (يوسف بن عابد الفاسي) (d.1048/1638) in his new-found home in Hadramawt, Yemen. The study seeks to investigate the Ṣūfī dimension of the corpus text and address its legacy within the riḥla tradition (AR. الرحلة al-riḥla) by the usage of Ṣūfī elements, generic riḥla codes, and devices pertaining to narrative. The results that emerged from this three-folded theoretical approach seems to support the posed hypothesis regarding the peregrinative reminiscence of ʾIbn ʿĀbid being an early – if not one of the earliest admitted to at least this day – forerunner to the mystical branch of riḥla that would later flower in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which the writings of the acclaimed Damascene scholar and Ṣūfī Shaykh ʿAbd al-Ġanī al-Nābulusī (عبد الغني النابلسي) (d. 1143/1731) are widely told to exemplify. Yet, the study also challenges the categorization of the riḥla genre, given the liberate and open nature of its format – resulting in a liable conventional standard, against which every riḥla ought to be measured, being almost impossible to produce. As an alternative, the study suggests that one rather should speak of developments or currents within the large body of literature called riḥla.