In this presentation, Aiyub Palmer traces how Sufi epistemology's heart-centered theory of knowledge became intellectually mainstream — made possible only once Ashʿarī theology, culminating with Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, developed a way to describe the self beyond bodies and accidents. He shows how Avicennian and early Sufi models of the soul converged into a distinctly Islamic phenomenology of spirit.