This paper will shed light on a seemingly forgotten notable of Ottoman Beirut. Yuhanna Abkariyus (d. 1886) was a dragoman who spent his working life acting for the British, both in Cairo and Beirut. His father was an ex-Armenian bishop and his mother a Maronite. Being educated by the American Protestant missionaries and an influential member of his “native” Protestant church, Abkariyus was a noted member of the Arab renaissance (nahda), writing, among other things, a global history and an English-Arabic dictionary. Despite these accomplishments, though, he is virtually missing from histories of Ottoman successor-states. The reason for this is simple. With his hybrid background he does not fit easily within any nationalist teleology; or at least not those of the states one might expect to claim him, such as Lebanon, Syria, or Armenia. Similarly, he is absent from the precursor histories of Arabism and Ottomanism. Both oversights demonstrate how dependent historians have been on national narratives even when they attempt to explain non-national realms. By drawing on Abkariyus’s experiences, which cannot sit within the framework of a single nation-state, and by delving into his history, “Qatf al-zuhur fi ta’rikh al-duhur” (Beirut 1873), I argue that we can regain an important vision of the nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectual scene. For Abkariyus, good governance, rather than ethnic or confessional partisanship, defined the active states of the world, and the Ottoman Empire, far from being in darkness, or yet on the brink of collapse, was one of its guiding lights.