In their analyses of the origins al al-?ah??w?’s notion of wa?an, scholars have offered divergent interpretations. For some, al-?ah??w?’s perception of “homeland” was, notwithstanding its various geographical origins, uniformly land-bound. While some argue that his perspectives about national community and identity were mainly gained from his experiences in France, others contend that these ideas were not an imported political imaginary, but were rather rooted in Arabic and Islamic concepts and especially in ethics of adab. On a different front of the debate, and in less cardinalized language, scholars argue that al-?ah??w?’s intellectual intervention lie somewhere between Europe and North Africa, in the trans-Mediterranean space of ideas. In this paper, I take the Mediterranean Sea as the very site whence the concept of wa?an is formed in al-?ah??w?’s thought. Examining al-?ah??w?’s maq?mah-inspired 1850 translation of Francois Fénelon’s 1699 Les Aventures de Télémaque, the paper reveals a pattern of homology between the Arabic genre and Télémaque. Towards that end, I proceed over three stages. First, I focus on the maq?mah, not only as an “insular” literary product, the result of a self-reflexive process that coincides particularly with how islands are aesthetically and functionally produced, but also as a genre that does take islands as its subject matter. Second, with the insular form in mind as an analytic tool, I draw on the history of cartography in early modern France to argue that the French text of Télémaque needs to be read in relation to particular cartographic practices that also represented islands on “portolan charts,” a specific genre of maps that pre-dated the contemporary discourse of sovereign state territoriality. Ultimately, examining al-?ah??w?’s later 1869 work, The Methodology of Egyptian Minds with Regard to the Marvel of Arabic Literature, I argue that the metaphorics of insularity subtending the text of Télémaque as well as the maq?mah extend beyond their formalist and aesthetic reach to inform al-?ah??w?’s Egypto-nationalist and imperialist discourse, what may be referred to as “nesological modernity.” With its political drive, this form of modernity works simultaneously to foreground a centripetal pull of the insular territoriality of Egypt while subjecting the Sudan to the centrifugal energies of Egypt’s expansionist worldliness.