In his highly intertextual, experimental novel Haddatha Abu Hurayra Qaal, Tunisian writer Mahmud al-Mas’adi engages a complex range of literary, religious and philosophical discourses. A monumental literary and political figure in Tunisia, al-Mas’ady’s mission was to re-invigorate arabophone Tunisian cultural production in the wake of its domination and repression by the French. His writing reveals his profound influence by Islamic modernist reformers such as Muhammed Abduh and Muhammed Iqbal, as well as his active appropriation of European modernist philosophy and literature, always in service to a Tunisian cultural fulcrum that reversed the “center/margin” model of European power. In Haddatha, al-Mas’adi mobilizes both the authoritative stature of the Hadith literature and the more subversive and elusive domain of Sufism. Haddatha both evokes and subverts the authoritativeness of its main character, an eponym of the revered yet controversial figure in Islamic history identified as the most prolific source of Hadith. Al-Mas’adi’s “Abu Hurayra” bears little resemblance to the historical figure, yet his use of the name is evocative of his role at the center of a number of critical debates on the authority of the Hadith literature. Throught the text, Al-Masa’dy’s reader is called upon to discern the reliability of suspect narratives with little or no context, and extract meaning from often obscure or highly poetic language. The text thus requires a rigorous intellectual work from his readers, a kind of secular ijtih?d or act of “exertion” and reasoning judgment that they must apply to negotiate their way through its disorienting terrain. I would argue that in al-Mas?ad? this exertion is also mystical in nature. In this way, al-Masa’dy would seem to call for a balance between reason and the need to recognize its limits – invoking an active Sufism as a mode of human development and a challenge to blind orthodoxy. The text thus both models an active Muslim subjectivity in its main character, and demands this exertion of its readers. It is to this modeling that I’d like to turn my attention in this paper. By examining the role of the Hadith, Sufism and modernism in Haddatha Abu Hurayra qaal, I argue that al-Mas’ady’s work invokes Sufism as a simultaneous challenge to European secularist, rationalist models that deny the role of faith, and to what he identifies as an unquestioning, ossified model of Islam whereby dogma has replaced the historic dynamism of debate and rigorous inquiry.