Anthropologists of Islam such as Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad have argued that late twentieth–century Islamist movements fundamentally challenge the divide erected by liberal modernity between the secular public sphere and the private moral sphere of religion. The insights of these scholars are extremely valuable to understanding the valence of these movements in the present day, but they tend to flatten the world preceding the nineteenth century, the time when secular-liberal modernity was supposedly introduced by European reformers. What was the role of public and private morality in Islamic societies before the nineteenth century? How did the category of religion take shape in the centuries before secularism, if at all? This paper explores the above questions through an examination of the concept of naṣīḥat in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire. While nasihat literally meant admonition or advice, I argue that it in the early modern period it came to encompass a new and broader type of political exchange that was based on the imparting of moral advice to a variety of individual, collective, and public actors. Fathers gave advice to their sons, sultans to the crowds, shaykhs to their disciplines, authors to their readers, and the state to its subjects. Indeed, the extreme variety and number of texts from this period dubbed nasihatnames, or advice manuals, forces historians to rethink the traditional definition of the nasihatname as merely a mirror-for-princes text. The paper uses the immensely popular nasihatname of the poet Nabi from 1702 to examine the contours of moral advice-giving in the early modern Islamic world as a practice which tied together evolving notions of private and public morality and new ideas about the "private individual" and the "public good." In the text, Nabi turns his sage advice to his young son about how to be a man into a biting critique of the empire. Nabi’s text makes clear the implications of the practice of nasihat as a whole, suggesting how texts meant to inculcate a private moral sphere also introduced new notions of individual political subjectivity. Through nasihat, we see how early modern notions of what belonged to the individual and the collective, as well as to faith and to politics, took shape prior to the onset of secular modernity as described by Asad and Mahmood.