This paper is a preliminary attempt to reconstruct the scholarly community and social networks of Qutb al-Din Muhammad al-Nahrawali (d.1582), a Muslim intellectual from Gujarat, India, who settled in Mecca, and led a diplomatic mission to Istanbul on behalf of the Meccan sharifs in 1557-58. In his record of the mission – concerned with seeking a replacement of the Ottoman representative in Mecca – al-Nahrawali noted the various places he traveled to and halted at in great detail, and included numerous observations on the political elites, scholars, Sufis, and friends he met and stayed with on his journey. Al-Nahrawali’s journey attests to the organic and vibrant ties between Islamic knowledge production centers of Cairo and Mecca on the one hand, and cities like Ahmedabad in Gujarat in western India on the other. A reconstruction of al-Nahrawali’s intellectual networks is thus integral to understanding the production of knowledge in the western Indian Ocean world. Overall, this paper employs al-Nahrawali as an important medium to open up the regional, archival and linguistic boundaries that have often defined our own modern scholarly communities.