Abdulghani al-Nabulusi was one of the major Arabic-speaking intellectuals of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, writing hundreds of books and treatises and exerting a deep influence throughout the Ottoman Empire. Despite a number of recent, introductory books about his life, there has yet to be a deep and critical examination of his works. This paper is an attempt to understand one of the more fascinating aspects of his oeuvre—his construction and narration of the self through a variety of genres. The paper integrates a number of unique sources that are rarely matched by other early modern authors. It first tracks how Nabulusi narrated the self through his travelogue-cum-dairy, then relates it to his commentary on Hudai’s revelatory diary, before examining his other works which center on recording daily or weekly actions. For instance, he not only kept track of Friday sermons but also wrote short manuals about the virtues of the days and the weeks. Finally, the paper contrasts this to his official collection of letters which expose a different facet of his authorial personality. I argue that these works represent a reorientation of experience toward quotidian action, aided by the bitter sumptuary battles and a piety movement of the late seventeenth century that aimed at transforming the daily habitus of Muslims. Thus Nabulusi argues for a notion of the self and knowledge anchored in daily observation, introspection, and examination. By doing so, the paper situates the Arabic-speaking Nabulusi in an Ottoman context of autobiography elucidated previously by scholars like Cemal Kafadar and Derin Terzioglu and challenges the literature on Arabic autobiographical writings that overlook the early modern period. Finally, it looks at the development of this different authorial self not only for its own sake but also in terms of the history of knowledge. That is to say how a self rooted in daily observation challenged and changed the type of information that authors in the early modern Middle East collected and examined.