Hailed as the leading Arab historian of the Ottoman Empire by modern scholars, the Meccan jurist (Qut̤b al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Nahrawālī’s (1511/12-1582) textual production included a wide range of genres beyond historical works on Mecca and the Ottoman conquest of Yemen. While al-Nahrawali can certainly be placed in the long line of Meccan chroniclers like Jarullah ibn Fahd (d.1547), a consideration of several of al-Nahrawali’s other works reveal his self-representation as the preeminentHadith scholar. He is believed to have composed a work on the Prophetic traditions that unfortunately perished in a fire. However, thanks to the survival of al-Nahrawali’s thabat, it is possible to gain insights not only into al-Nahrawali’s assessment of the state of hadith scholarship in the sixteenth century, but the way al-Nahrawali’s own inscription into a genealogy of Hadith transmitters allowed him to establish his authority in the highly competitive scholarly community in Mecca and beyond. Through a focus on al-Nahrawali’s thabat and his attention to mentions of Hadith auditions during his travels, this paper seeks to recover a less-researched facet of al-Nahrawali’s life to comment on the cultivation of intersecting and overlapping lineages in explaining the rise of a Muslim intellectual from Gujarat to the preeminent juridical authority in Mecca.