Sufi hagiography is a subject only recently coming under critical, rhetorical study. As late as the 1990s, collections of saintly biographies were viewed as historical sources corrupted by pre-modern superstition. The scholar’s job was to read through the texts for the kernels of historical “truth” contained in the works. In the last decade, however, a number of scholars have sought to re-evaluate the status of Sufi hagiography. This re-evaluation has been part of a broader movement that seeks to understand how the character and trajectory of Sufism has been shaped by a constellation of factors, including theological debates, political alliances, and economic realities. This paper is situated within this scholarly trend and will apply intertextual analysis to several major works of Sufi hagiography, in both Persian and Arabic, ranging from Sulami’s Tabaqat al-Sufiya (Arabic) to Jami’s Nafahat al-Uns (Persian). These works each contain a biography of Ibn Khafif, a member of Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd’s circle who was renowned for both his asceticism and theological acumen. His biography is thus an especially rich site of contestation for those debating the place of bodily discipline in later Sufism, and Sufism’s relationship with fiqh. Following Kristeva, such intertextual analysis will seek to move beyond “mere source hunting,” revealing how pre-modern Islamic writers performed authorial transparency in order to, seemingly, let the evidence speak for itself. This study examines the ways in which these authors put forward arguments about what Sufism was and should be through selection and arrangement of the stories about the figures they chronicle. Such a study will reveal how these writers positioned themselves as transmitters of received sayings and reports, sometimes repeating verbatim entries in previous collections, while nevertheless presenting radically different pictures of Ibn Khafif, and thus articulating widely varied visions of Sufism. Furthermore, the paper will show how references to early Arabic texts are used to reinforce the authority of authors writing in Persian and how authorship of Arabic texts on subjects such as hadith and usul al-fiqh are used to bolster the credentials of Ibn Khafif. By demonstrating how these stories from the lives of Sufi saints pass back and forth between Arabic and Persian, this paper seeks to question the ways in which contemporary scholarship divides bodies of literature by language and place of origin, and the applicability of such a model to multi-lingual literary traditions that span large geographic areas over several centuries.