This paper explores the literary project of Mahmud al-Mas'adi, one of Tunisia’s most renowned public intellectuals. Al-Mas'adi was a writer, trade unionist, educator, Minister of Cultural Affairs, Speaker of Parliament, as well as the architect of Tunisia’s educational policy following independence in 1956. In addition to serving as Editor in Chief of the renowned journal al-Mabahith [Investigations], al-Mas'adi wrote a series of stories, novels and plays between 1938 and 1941 – including: Hadath Abu Harira qal [Abu Harira spoke, saying…], al-Sudd [The Dam] and Mawlid al-Nisyan [The Genesis of Forgetfulness]. Written in a non-realist and highly symbolic style, al-Mas'adi’s fiction avoids any direct references to Tunisia’s social or political context. His works seem mythical in nature, staged outside of time and space and devoid of any markers of historical, geographical, social or political specificity. It is the absence of a clearly delineated anti-colonialist or nationalist agenda in particular that has perplexed and even angered Arab critics over the years, including the “Dean of Arabic Literature” Taha Husayn. This paper seeks to bridge al-Mas'adi’s role as a public intellectual and policy maker with his theory of literature and cultural production. In addition to situating al-Mas'adi within the broader Tunisian and Arab literary scene of the period, I explore his engagement with early Arab and Islamic Thought (Mansur al-Hallaj, Abu al-'Ala' al-Ma'arri, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and Muhammad Ibn Arabi), as well as Existentialist philosophy and literature (Goethe, Dostoevsky, Camus and Sartre). I demonstrate that his literary project is rooted in an understanding of creation and existence inflected by Sufi conceptualizations of the Self. I argue that al-Mas'adi’s fiction enacts an Islamic Poiesis – namely, an aesthetic engagement with Islamic Thought that expands the horizons of artistic representation as a mode of creation. I am interested in demonstrating how the intertextuality between Sufism and Existentialism on the one hand, as well as Islam and Arabic Literary discourse on the other, serves to complicate the boundary between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ thought.