The historiography of pre-modern Arabic autobiography has centered on the works of elite male Sunni scholars, like al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), al-Suyūṭī (d. 1505), Ibn Ṭawq (d. 1505), and Ibn Ṭūlūn (d. 1546).  Historians have yet to find pre-1600 autobiographical writings of nomads, slaves, women, or peasants, but the diary of one 16th-century Aleppan weaver named Kamāl al-Dīn offers new insights into the daily life of a Syrian craftsman. He recorded political gossip, ethnographic details, and notes about his professional life, but significantly for this presentation, also long passages about his personal friendships, including a list of friends who died in the plague of late 997/early 998, descriptions of visits to friends’ homes, his attendance at weddings, and samples of poetry that he composed on the occasion of his friends’ weddings or even their deaths.  This diarist’s tributes to his friendships typically functioned as excurses about his social, communal self. Although this diary stands as the earliest known craftsman’s Arabic self-narrative, there are many indications that Kamāl al-Dīn was deeply familiar with autobiographical works and certainly understood the discursive conventions of this historically elite genre of writing. He appears to have composed this text with the expectation that his narrative would have a public audience: of his peers during his lifetime and, after his death, readers of his text bequeathed to a local library. Such considerations of a public audience and practices affecting the afterlife of one’s writings were normally reserved for elite thinkers and writers. Merchants’ and craftsmen’s letters, receipts, and account books were incidental and rarely conceptualized as writings for prosperity, so his environment created no expectations of self-narrative. These elite practices through which a writer like Kamāl al-Dīn developed his interiority and constituted his private self also had a consciously public dimension. In this presentation I want to investigate the social practices and cultures of literacy into which Kamāl al-Dīn inscribed himself and his closest friends in early Ottoman Aleppo.