The Middle Eastern studies today considers Ottoman literature a “pre-national” literature that prepared the ground for the 20th century Turkish nationalist novel and hence confines it to Turkish studies. I analyze Ziya Pasha’s Harabat ("Tavern," 1876)— a literary anthology that includes works in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Chagatai from pre-Islamic times to late 19th century—as a work of comparative Middle Eastern literatures. I make a close reading of the anthology’s introduction, which is a comparative history of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and French literatures. These traditions constituted the Ottoman literary community’s intellectual formation during the late 19th century. I thus argue that Harabat crystallizes a key transitional moment for the Ottoman literary history: While it projects the works of these traditions as members of a textual corpus that defines a multilingual Ottoman literary elite whose members come from the empire’s cosmopolitan cities such as Beirut, Damascus, and Istanbul, Ziya Pasha’s introduction also includes instances that augur the emergence of later literary histories that project these texts as properties of national civilizations. To delineate this eventual transformation, I analyze Ziya Pasha’s anthology in conjunction with literary histories written after Harabat during the late Ottoman period such as Tarih-i edebiyat-i Osmaniye (History of Ottoman Literature) by Faik Reşat and Istılahat-ı Edebiye (Literary Terms) by Muallim Naci, which projected Arabic and Persian texts as “old classics” that influenced the Ottoman Turkish literature. This perspective signified the dissolution of a literary community whose identity relied on its ability to draw upon the reservoir of canonized Turkish, Persian, and Arabic texts. These works, which hitherto constituted a cultural reservoir that formed the basis for the Ottoman literary community’s identity, become akin to cultural ambassadors of nations and civilizations. The current Middle Eastern studies that creates stark divisions between classical and modern as well as among Iranian, Turkish, and Arabic studies has detrimental consequences for understanding the multilingual Ottoman literary community that strived to undermine these very divisions to maintain its cultural identity. Only a comparative framework that bridges these divisions can redefine Ottoman literature as a multilingual, imperial literature rather than the heritage of modern Turkish literature only.