This paper will demonstrate that the Arabian Peninsula was viewed as a critical site of anticolonial resistance in the eyes of Nahḍawī intellectuals. It will argue for a new spatial interpretation of three well-known Nahḍawī intellectuals: Amīn al-Rīḥānī, a Lebanese-American poet and literary critic, Rashīd Riḍā, a Cairo-based journalist and Islamic theorist, and Shakīb Arslān, a pan-Islamist activist based at the League of Nations in Geneva. These three litérateurs had regular interactions with the intellectual life of the Arabian Peninsula. They each made frequent trips to the Arabian Peninsula, kept in regular contact with local intellectuals in Riyadh, Mecca, Sana‘a, and Kuwait City, and wrote extensively about peninsular culture and politics. They wrote hundreds of letters, poems, personal memoirs, and newspaper articles detailing their views and experiences interacting with this understudied region. Their corpora show that there was a much wider transnational flow of Nahḍa people and ideas beyond the so-called “Cairo–Beirut axis.” With most of the Arab lands under brutal colonial occupation, Nahḍawīs perceived the Arabian Peninsula to be the last remaining vestige of non-colonized Arab space, and they consequently sought to create a parallel non-colonized intellectual space to buttress this territory’s independence. By showing that the Arabian Peninsula held a critical position on the cognitive map of the Nahḍa, this paper will seek to cause a shift in the territorial orientation of Nahḍa studies, leading to a better understanding of the sociology of the Nahḍa. It also seeks to contribute to a wider conversation about the mobility of ideas, notions of autochthony, and exilic knowledge production, building on Said’s concept of “traveling theory.” At the same time, this research continues the important work of de-provincializing the Arabian Peninsula within the field of Middle Eastern studies by highlighting its position as a key node of intellectual and cultural exchange.