As Sufi travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries peregrinated about the well-protected (and, as the case often enough was, not so-well-protected!) domains of the Ottoman sultan, they encountered many different representatives of political power, encounters which they often then recorded in their travel narratives. The records of these encounters often provide excellent insights into both the performance of political power ‘on the ground’ in places central and not-so-central in the Ottoman realms, as well as the diverse ways in which Sufi shaykhs interacted with political power and performed or questioned their own identity as Ottoman subjects and political actors in their own right. My paper focuses on the interactions and self-presentation of one such traveler, the Kurdish Sufi shaykh Taha ibn Yaḥya al-Kurdī (1723-1800), who traveled extensively in his native Kurdish regions as well as in Syria, Palestine, and the Hijaz, before settling down in Damascus. Drawing primarily upon his multifaceted riḥla, with similar writings by other Sufi travelers of the period providing contextualization and contrast, I explore his encounters with various representatives of (sometimes ambiguously) Ottoman political power, focusing on the varying dynamics of these encounters and the rhetorical work Taha al-Kurdī makes of such interactions in shaping his autobiographical image. I contrast his encounters with Ottoman political actors, on the one hand, with his engagement with the saintly people he encounters on his travels, demonstrating Taha al-Kurdī’s drawing of overlapping, but sometimes uncomfortable and dangerous, geographies of Ottoman political power (and absence of power) concurrent with the geographies (physical, textual, and spiritual) of the saintly Ottoman men and women inhabiting the same or similar spaces. Finally, I argue for Taha al-Kurdī’s own performance of an ambiguous Ottoman identity, manifest in terms of linguistics, devotion, social networks, and the very physical routes he took, within an empire that was at once unitary and decentralized and precarious, tensions that Taha al-Kurdī himself felt, embodied, and textually reproduced.