Literary scholars have often conceptualized self-narratives – diaries, memoirs, autobiographies – as manifestations of the urge to pursue self-knowledge, due to their perceived self-reflective nature. In this paper, I will approach the question of self-knowledge in Ottoman writings from a different angle – that of knowing oneself through the self of another, through a close reading of a ‘Abd al-ghani al-Nablusi’s commentary on Aziz Mahmud Hudayi’s spiritual diary, Tajalliy?t. The common assumption that diaries are primarily self-reflective has often relegated pre-modern Middle Eastern autobiographical writing to the fringes of the genre: if pre-modern Arabic self-narratives did not reflect on their authors’ inner states like their early-modern European counterparts, we are told, how could we consider them part of the same class of writing? Critics of this argument, such as Kristen Brustad, have pointed out that in Arabic autobiographies, individualization is expressed through “descriptions of situations, actions, as well as other actors’ emotional states.” Al-Nablusi’s commentary offers an opportunity to sidestep the preoccupation with individualism in both of the above approaches. This paper will have two parts. In the first, I discuss the larger genre to which Hudayi’s diary belongs, including inadequacies of the English term “spiritual diary.” In the second part, I explore how al-Nablusi’s knowledge of his own self is not articulated through what literary theorist Robert Rowland Smith calls an “ideology of individualism,” but through close attention to Hudayi’s own rhetoric and reflections on his spiritual experiences. In the process, I contribute to ongoing scholarly conversations about the formation of pre-modern selves as well as how the generation of knowledge involves the self, the other, and the divine.