Biographies of medieval saints often swell over time: accounts of dramatic encounters, pithy sayings, miracles and other accretions turn local mystics, poets, and ascetics into heroic or legendary figures. Regardless of their historical accuracy, these stories do important cultural work: confirming societal notions of saintliness, providing useful narratives of exemplary behavior and signposts for understanding momentous social and cultural changes. Modern scholars of these figures, however, face a choice between whittling these biographies down to what is well-supported by credible evidence--and risking being left with relatively little that is certain--or approaching these narratives as evidence in their own right, but evidence of the social shaping of these heroic figures. Several recent Moroccan writers have pioneered a new way of approaching these saintly medieval figures: the historical novel. While both Ahmed Tawfiq, the Minister of Endowments and Religious Affairs, and Salem Himmich, a prominent philosopher, have achieved international recognition for their work, the new wave of Sufi historical novels includes other noteworthy figures. This talk examines two works by the Moroccan historian and Sufi scholar 'Abd al-Ilah Bin 'Arafah, "Jabal Q f" (2002) and the recently published "BilBd S?dd" (2009). The talk analyzes how Bin 'Arafah uses the colorfully imagined lives of the Andalusian Sufis Muhyiddin Ibn al-'Arabi (1165-1240) and Abu al-Hasan al-Shushtari (1212-1269) to explore the complex and tumultuous intellectual, religious and political landscape of the period. In elegant and sensuous prose studded with well-chosen poetic fragments, the author highlights the aesthetic dimension of the mystical hermeneutic as embodied in these two crucial--yet very different--figures. At the same time these novels provide a powerful commentary on current cultural, political and religious tensions in Morocco at a time in which Sufism and the Andalusian cultural legacy have been actively promoted by the monarchy as symbols of a tolerant and culturally pluralistic modernity.