Though Valencia, Granada, Castile and other regions in Iberia had once been the celebrated birthplace of intellectual paragons such as Ibn Rushd and mystical exemplars such as Ibn Arabī, the Reconquista of Muslim-ruled lands on the Iberian Peninsula would usher in a steady decline in the intellectual and spiritual education for the morisco population in the 16th century. Moriscos, Muslims forcibly baptized to Catholicism in the first part of the sixteenth-century, found themselves spiritually and religiously crippled. The significant decrease in scholars expertly trained usūl al fiqh, tafsir and lugha would compel some moriscos to seek out alternative methods of spirituality and Islamic education. One morisco scholar who exemplified this hybrid approach to religiosity and mystical practice was Mancebo de Arévalo. Primarily concentrating on Mancebo’s text titled El Sumario de la relación y ejercicio espiritual, this paper explores selected elements of the anonymous scholar’s mystical reflections and how they innovatively and creatively incorporate Sufi thought with particular attention to Ibn Arabī’s formulations on epistemology, ilm and ma’rifa. Knowledge has a deep and enduring significance in the history of Andalusian societies in particular and the Islamic tradition in general---‘ilm (knowledge) of God, His attributes and His Essence is the only means by which the servant comes to know the Divine. But as I argue in this chapter, Mancebo’s conception and discourse on knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge (and mystical closeness to the Divine) takes on a different valence for he skillfully emphasizes gnosis or ‘marifa as paramount in the aspirant’s mystical constitution as opposed to ‘ilm. In contradistinction to ‘ilm which historically concentrated on more discursive and acquired means of knowing, mari’fa can be defined as a more experiential, visceral and intimate knowledge of God (at least in Mancebo’s estimation). This emphasis on ma’rifa as a reliable means of knowledge acquisition and divine realization was particularly fitting for a community struggling to establish a connection with their ancestral faith in a constrictive environment of religious surveillance and growing inquisitorial scrutiny.