Abu Bakr Ibn al-`Arabi (d. 543/1148) was one of the most important Andalusi religious scholars of the Almoravid period and served for many years as Qadi al-Qudat of Seville. His autobiographical account of his studies in the Middle East allow us to reconstruct the route by which Abu Bakr became a jurist--and the way he depicted that process in later years to bolster his prestige and authority. Though he seems to have trained in his youth to become a courtier in ta'ifa era Seville as his father had been, the absorption of Seville into the Almoravid Empire and the confiscation of his family's fortune meant he had to re-invent himself at the age of 17. The most prestigious path open to him under the Almoravids was to become a jurist. He undertook a perilous journey to the east with his father, who used his diplomatic skills to secure a coveted investiture from the Abbasid Caliph for the Almoravid sultan Yusuf Ibn Tashfin in this hopes that the sultan would rehabilitate him out of gratitude. Abu Bakr pursued a parallel effort to restore the status of the family, studying religious sciences with some of the great religious scholars of the age, including al-Ghazali. When Abu Bakr returned, he was able to claim elite status on the basis of his legal knowledge and scholarly pedigree; he eventually got his family's property restored. Unlike many other Andalusi jurists who undertook a similar journey, Abu Bakr never ceased referring to it in his writings. He remained anxious about his status and authority and had to keep reiterating his right to it on the basis of his studies in the Middle Eastern centers of Islamic learning. This paper will examine Abu Bakr's depiction of his journey to the East, especially in his Qanun al-ta'wil, seeing both his voyage and his later literary depiction of that voyage as strategies at different points in Abu Bakr's career to claim authority as a jurist. This will shed light on diffusion of religious knowledge from the Middle East to the Islamic West (clearly a center-periphery relationship), the unique role of the qadi in the Almoravid state and society, and the embeddedness of legal practice in social relationships.