Tunisian writer, Salih Suwaysi covered a number of literary conventions—-poetry, the novel, historical geography, among others—-in writings that reveal a deep social consciousness and a heightened sense of place and love for his home city. With little formal education, Suwaysi offers a glimpse into life in Tunisia about mid-way through France’s colonial rule over the country, while also revealing a strong sense of identification with Qayrawan. While not all of his writings focus on that city, what does allows for an examination of thinking on place and urbanism in the Arab-Islamic world during the colonial period. Considered the fourth holiest city in Islam, Qayrawan played a central role in the construction of Suwaysi’s character and his understanding of belonging to a particular place, suggesting a proto-nationalist sentiment at a time of entrenched French colonial rule in Tunisia. Suwaysi’s writings also place him within larger regional intellectual trends that spanned the Arab east and west, to be examined in this paper; he describes himself in autobiographical statements that introduce most of his published works as having read the writings of leading thinkers from the east, especially Egypt, in particular those of 19th Islamic reformers, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abdu. Having recently collected Suwaysi’s writings in Tunisia, I aim to bring the ideas and writings of Salih Suwaysi, in particular those that emphasize his sense of urban identity and urban history with regard to his birthplace, into comparative historical perspective. Urban studies in the Arab world and the Middle East has been developing considerably among scholars of architecture, art history, geography, and other fields. This study will analyze various types of Suwaysi’s writings for evidence of the role of urban space in identity formation, set in the historical context of early 20th century French colonial Tunisia, while also considering the historiographical genre of khitat (historical topography) literature. Having only recently returned from conducting research in the North African country, my work in this paper marks the onset of a larger project that will focus on a particular city, Qayrawan, but will situate its history and the history of its monuments and their restorations in larger historical processes, by considering an indigenous 19th c. literary voice within the cultural and historical context of the French Protectorate over Tunisia with a later comparison of how the city became part of the national project following the country’s mid-20th c. independence from France.