In 1693, Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulusi, one of the major intellectuals writing in Arabic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, embarked on a major journey through much of the Ottoman Arab lands. He detailed this experience in the longest of his four travelogues titled, The Literal and the Figurative: The Journey to Syria, Egypt, and the Hijaz. While the main goal of his journey was to visit and verify the many “friends of God,” both living and dead, he also used the framework of travel to open discussions of varied intellectual topics and mix genres together into a novel work. This paper attempts to situate this major opus of al-Nabulusi within its Ottoman historical and intellectual context. In particular it focuses on the text as a response to the Kadizadeli challenges of the seventeenth century, despite the fact that it contains very little information for the positivistic historian. Replete with references to controversies over coffee, tobacco, zikr, and saint visitation, the travelogue shows the lasting reaction to the Kadizadeli movement that reverberated throughout the empire both in its capital and in its provinces. Moreover, it explores the connection between this counter-reaction to the Kadizadelis and the al-Nabulusi’s innovative narrative and epistemological strategies.