Pushing back against configurations of Arabic literature that privilege the nation-state and/or national identities as an organizing principle, this paper will turn to the early modern period, immediately before the dissolution of the region’s great empires. Here I will look not toward the Ottoman lands but rather West, to the furthest Maghreb and the territories to its south across the Sahara. Pivoting away from a reading of the Napoleonic invasion of 1798 as the marker of literary modernity, I will consider a different invasion that had equally significant repercussions. Namely, I will interpret the textual tradition that memorializes Morocco’s 1591 invasion of the famous hubs of West African Arabic literary production, Timbuktu and Djenné - an event that remains the greatest pre-colonial fissure between Morocco and its Muslim neighbours in sub-Saharan Africa. This moment of invasion will serve as a way to analyse the consequences of the shifting borders of literary community in the Arabic textual production of this period, a moment when Arabic literature’s diversity – specifically its inclusivity of sub-Saharan Africa – became a point of notable contention. The interpretations I offer will hinge on the imaginative category of ummah - or universal Muslim community - as a condition of narrative possibility, an alternative to the national, but also as something for which textuality draws out its embedded tensions. Through a series of close readings of the Moroccan Abd al-‘Aziz al-Fishtali’s 16th century Manahil al-safa fi ma’ athir mawalina al-shurafa’ and Muhammad al-Saghir b. al-hajj ‘Abd Allah al-Ifrani's 18th century Nuzhat al-hadi bi-akhbar mulk al-qarn al-hadi in conjunction with the West African scholar Abd al-Rahman b. ‘Abd Allah b. ‘Imran al-Sa‘di’s 16th century Ta’rikh al-sudan, we will see that the texts that remember the invasion both from the Moroccan and West African sides implicitly articulate who has the right to Arabic and the tradition to which it is attached. Embedded within their literary tropes and elegiac prose, their assertions of belonging are unmistakably legible in their repeated manipulations of the conventions of classical Arabic literature, marshalled to either exclude West Africa from the Arabic-Islamic heritage or to legitimate its place within it. What emerges is a view of what we stand to gain by expanding our temporal and geographic scope when reading Arabic literature.