Once it had been established, the dogma that Muhammad was the final prophet led many Sunni Muslim scholars to argue against the possibility of comparable representatives of the divine after his passing. However, especially during the formative period of Islam when theological dogmas such as this one were still being debated and formulated, one witnesses world-views among Muslim thinkers which contrast strongly with such perceptions. In this paper, I will focus on the perspective of Muslim mystics on prophethood (nubuwwa) and sainthood (wal?ya), themes which were a strong focus of interest in the oldest surviving mystical texts, those which date from the 3rd/9th century. As one might expect, the unique break in prophethood from the death of Muhammad to the reappearance of Jesus, dictated by the eventual interpretation of "kh?tam al-nabiyan" (Qur'an 33/40) as "the last of the prophets", created a major challenge for all mystics. The mystically compatible emphasis in the Qur'an on the perpetual and all-inclusive nature of prophethood became modified by the eventual interpretation of this single verse and the corroborating hadith which were compiled by the mid 3rd/9th century. It is therefore perhaps no surprise that this should have become the topic of most interest among early Sufis. One discovers in the first systematic theory of sainthood, the Sarat al-awliy S of ak-m al-Tirmidhf (d. between 295-300/905-910) and the treatise al-Kashf wael-baytn of AbK Saf d al-Kharr?z (d. ca. 286/899), that Sufis had already developed the notion that saints (awliyhe) were representatives of the divine during the unique break in prophethood, and that their status in relation to the prophets (anbiyel) had already become hotly-contested. Both authors argue that the status of the saint is virtually as high as that of the prophet. While Kharrtz was writing in response to the view among Sufis that sainthood was in fact superior to prophethood, Tirmidh reserves his polemical comments for skeptical non-mystics (e.g. exoteric scholars, -ulamic al-.ghir; pietists, lubb,d, qurr?). I will consider their arguments in the light of the dogma that Muhammad was the final prophet, which had been established by their time. And, drawing on recent academic debates about the precise dating of the establishment of this dogma, I will extrapolate from these texts the factors which seem to have prompted their authors to take their distinctive stances in support of the virtually-prophetic status of saints.