Most critical assessments and theorizing on modern Arabic literature prioritize the Nahda as a foundational cultural event in both periodizing the genesis of modern Arabic cultural production and theorizing its ‘modern’ character. While this historical framing has a lot of merit and appeal for the adherents and advocates of the import-inflected Nahda paradigm, some critics have seen it as extending the ‘colonial’ ethos of filial provenance from the west with its Eurocentric implications for questions of Arab identity formation and Arabic literary cannon. In particular, some protest and contend the Western perception of Arabic literature that is inherent in this privileging of the Nahda that perpetuates, both directly and implicitly, the forfeiture of the Arabic literary and cultural heritage that flourished in the previous age, in particular before the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. In my paper, I argue that the engagement with European culture before the Nahda as evidenced in travel writing from the Western Mediterranean/Maghrib reveals a rich and dynamic field of writing that provides a basis for rewriting the debates on modern Arabic literature. Not only did these writers contest Eurocentric cultural perceptions of Arab and Muslim identity and culture but they also engaged in the continental debates that prevailed in the post-Reformation period through reported religious disputations as exemplified by writings by Andalusian intellectuals after the expulsion of the Muslims from Iberia. The argument of my paper will also focus on the need to elaborate a network theory that could accommodate and reflect pre-modern Arabic cultural production. Such theorizing prioritizes cultural theory that centers on questions of translation and transfer of ideas by early modern Arab intellectuals who were cognizant of and responsive to the emergent and transformative geopolitics in the trans-Mediterranean cultures at the time. Such rethinking would also enable us to ground early modern Arabic literature in the pre-Nahda times and provide an alternative to the dominant European Renaissance intellectual model by emphasizing Arab cosmopolitan literary outlooks and the writers’ engagement with global cultural events.