As Esther-Miriam Wagner (2021), Ghayde Ghraowi (2022) and Hacı Osman Gündüz (2022) have observed, the past few years have witnessed a rise in the field of Ottoman Arabic literature. While this scholarship has mainly focused on Arabic works produced within the Ottoman Empire, this paper sheds light upon the reception of pre-Ottoman Arabic works in the Ottoman context. In particular, it analyses Hacı İbrahim’s (1826–88) articles on Arabic language and literature in various Ottoman newspapers, such as Tarık, Vakit, and Tercüman-ı Hakikat. Hacı İbrahim has been studied as a ‘conservative’ author because he criticised Tanzimat modernisation and constantly praised Arabic language and literature. At the same time, he advocated ‘modern’ views. For example, he emphasised that Ottomans should not merely understand Arabic works; they, unlike early modern Ottoman authors, should also translate them into Turkish. Furthermore, Hacı İbrahim believed that there was no difference between Arabic and Ottoman literatures; in fact, an anonymous author who shared his key beliefs also claimed in the 162th issue of the newspaper Malumat that ‘Ottoman literature means Arabic literature’. Hacı İbrahim claimed that al-Mutanabbī (d. 965) was part of an Ottoman’s ‘natural diet’, as he responded against an anonymous author who claimed in Tercüman-ı Hakikat that it was not natural for an Ottoman reader to read al-Mutanabbī’s works, which were seen as ‘roasted chickpeas made of iron’ that ‘may break one’s teeth’. While Hacı İbrahim has defended the need for Ottomans to learn and read Arabic, his articles very rarely, if ever, make references to ‘Ottoman Arabic works’. As this paper will show, when late Ottoman Turkish works, such as Hacı İbrahim’s articles, discuss Arabic literature, they tend to draw more on pre-Ottoman works such as Imruʾ al-Qays’s (d. c. 550) Muʿallaqa ode than on nahḍa writings. Rather than studying pre-modern Arabic works within the context of their source culture, the paper sheds light upon the ‘afterlife’, i.e., new receptions and interpretations, that pre-modern Arabic works attained in the Ottoman context. It claims that pre-Ottoman Arabic works also constituted an integral component of the multilingual Ottoman canon, which excluded many Ottoman Arabic works. Finally, the paper posits that the tendency to view Ottoman literature as Arabic literature in late Ottoman works prepared the ground for later literary histories, which studied Ottoman literature as Turkish literature and hence overlooked other linguistic traditions that constituted the Ottoman canon.