In early fourteenth-century Ilkhan Iran, the Sufi poet of Tabriz Mahmud Shabistari (d. ca. 1320) composed the Gulshan-i Raz (“Garden of Mystery”), a masterpiece Persian poem on Sufi doctrine and practice. More specifically, the Gulshan concisely encapsulated, in a didactic question-and-answer format, the controversial philosophy of the famed Andalusian Sufi Muhyi al-Din Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 1240). While the poem’s simple summary of Ibn ‘Arabi’s cosmology and perspective on the unity of belief (iman) and infidelity (kufr) are well-known, this paper asserts that the Gulshan was a foundational master text for the people of tahqiq, or the muhaqqiqs, a new group of Ibn ‘Arabian Sufi-scholars who treated the cosmos and human self as ever-changing scriptures on par with the Qur’an. Translated either as “verification” or “realization,” tahqiq, as it was formulated by Ibn ‘Arabi, was a practical epistemology for seeing all created entities as self-disclosures of Divine Truth (haqq) and God’s literal Being (wujud). Just as the Qur’an is an infinitely reinvigorated scripture, the cosmos (macrocosm) and the human self (microcosm) are compendiums of God’s speech to be understood by the Sufi muhaqqiqs, or “realizers”. These muhaqqiqs explicitly differentiated themselves from the people of taqlid, which means “imitation” or blind following of the rational intellect (‘aql) or past precedent. To be more specific, the muhaqqiqs championed direct experience of revelation—found equally in creative readings of the Qur’an, enchanted observation of the physical universe, and introspection—in opposition to the faulty knowledge of philosophers, jurists, and theologians. Mahmud Shabistari lauded tahqiq and denounced taqlid in the Gulshan. Furthermore, he did so in simple, memorable, and pedagogical Persian poetry, in contrast to the difficult and revelatory prose of Ibn ‘Arabi. This is what made the Gulshan a foundational, initiatory text for the people of tahqiq in the centuries following the poem’s creation. This paper analyzes the Gulshan and a few of its commentaries from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to show how it shaped what it meant to be a muhaqqiq, one who believes in the continuous renewal of Divine Truth (haqq) in scripture, self, and cosmos.